Egyptian Darkness and the Diaspora of Light

Notes and Reflections on the Rural Southern Illinois Intelligentsia

Andrew (Weeks)

Egyptian Darkness
Egypt from the Bottom Up
Depths of Egyptian Darkness
The Diaspora of Light
Homage to Oblivion
Lost Byways
Life after Life

For the better part of a year (May 2019-March 2020), I researched and traveled in my native region of Southern Illinois. I was motivated by the typical desire of an older person to revisit his origins and contemplate his life’s trajectory; but I was also convinced that it would be possible to explore society by examining the microcosm of a single marginal region. I decided to get involved in productive labor and to examine the experiences of my formative years. Since I can never completely renounce studies, I revisited the intellectual influences of my youth and generation. I’ve turned the notes and blog that I kept into a continuous narrative, capped by my waking nightmares as my personal situation became desperate and the corona pandemic spread. Mixed into this factual but introspective account are some reflections on history, class conflict, and racial tensions in Southern Illinois, along with a certain vision of the future and a final nightmare. Those observations are perhaps of interest apart from the personal narrative. Unfortunately, I will probably never find the time or motivation to extract and rework them.

1. Egyptian Darkness

Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
James Joyce, “The Dead,” Dubliners

After a year of planning and several preparatory excursions, I am finally ready on May 31 to begin my exploration of what I refer to as “Egyptian darkness.” On the last day of the month, I pack a few possessions and drive four and a half hours south to Carbondale, Illinois. I had driven down three times to make contacts and rent an efficiency apartment near the Southern Illinois University (SIU) campus. In April, I attended a conference in the South of France. It lasted five days, to which I added another ten to tour Provence and practice my French. The project I had undertaken with the organizer Didier Kahn had to do with writings attributed to the sixteenth-century non-conformist philosopher of nature Paracelsus. Like his contemporary the magus Agrippa von Nettesheim or the later heretic Giordano Bruno, Paracelsus was one of those larger-than-life eccentric wanderers of the Renaissance whom I could appropriate as a role model if I were unabashedly grandiose and not the outwardly self-effacing scholar who harbors a secret life. Nothing in my resume supports the viability of the sort of research I propose to do now. During the conference, neither Didier nor my research acquaintances knew what to make of my plan to “study” the poor south of my home state traditionally known as “Little Egypt,” to which I tried to lend a dash of color by referring to it as the “Mezzogiorno” of Illinois, the disdained and impoverished rump end of my state. I rationalized my plan by claiming that I had had enough of obscure centuries-old documents and preferred conversation with the living and the ordinary. When I flew home to Bloomington, Illinois, I was ready to open a new chapter. There were some loose ends to be tied up or snipped off. On the last day of May, everything is ready. I tell my wife and son that I plan to come home for Father’s Day and set off.

Why am I heading south at the age of 72? In moving back where I came from, I want to untangle the involution of my life. I don’t want to end up like the aging scholars who are cocooned in their arcane obsessions and blindered for life by their absorption in the rarified prestige of their circles. Since recovering from an exhausting cancer treatment two years ago, I’ve been doing things to stimulate my mind with fresh intellectual pursuits. I’m frustrated with a research that separates me from others rather than connecting me with life as it’s lived now. Like many at my age, I still have some life in me and want to make it into something that’s at least challenging and meaningful to me. My nephew, an attractive but solitary young man, fills his idle hours by searching the forest for suitable pieces of wood which he whittles and sands into spoons or other objects of use or decoration. My research and writing are my crafting of found objects, the quirky pastime of an older man. I have another rationale as well. Academic specialization driven by careerism stifles genuine intellectual curiosity. I want to resist that tendency, no matter how disreputable my efforts appear to the specialists.

On my way south, I think about the literature I’ve been reading on Southern Illinois. Land Between the Rivers was published in 1973 and represents the region as it appeared when I was growing up and beginning my studies at SIU. One of the authors was Henry Dan Piper, a formidable Arts and Sciences Dean who had once worked on the Manhattan Project and received his doctorate from Princeton. I remember him as the faculty mentor of an honors course I took in which we discussed an oddly disparate set of books that included the Lattimore translation of Homer’s Iliad and Walden Two by B.F. Skinner. Piper was a standard bearer for the empire-building SIU President Delyte Morris. During Morris’s tenure, illustrious capacities such as R. Buckminster Fuller were recruited or lured out of retirement to bolster the reputation of the erstwhile teacher’s college. In a spirit of regional patriotism, Piper compiled a vivid and rounded portrait of Southern Illinois. The dean’s literary scholarship is evident in his citation of poems, song texts, and travel accounts, and his Arts and Sciences breadth in expositions on the culture, economy, history, geology, and flora and fauna of Southern Illinois. Until I read Land Between the Rivers, I had never heard the claim that there are more kinds of trees in Southern Illinois than in all of Europe or that twenty percent of our plants are terminal, at the limit of their natural habitats. Growing up in White County, I thought our woods were motley and characterless, our rivers flood-prone and flanked by mud-caked banks. Now I wonder to what degree my perception was the projection of a sense of inferiority common to many. Egyptian darkness is my sense of having gone through life in flight from my origins and incognizant of the place that made me what I am. Egypt’s darkness is the blindness of its denizens and the forgetfulness of its wayward sons. Darkness is the embodiment of grand schemes come to naught, the vanityof our deluded striving.

First, I follow I-74 to I-57, Champaign-Urbana where I received my degrees after deserting SIU my senior year. Then south, past Charleston, home of my father’s family. A half hour later I reach the hectic shunt where I-57 merges with I-70 at Effingham before branching back south through wooded ravines which I have always perceived as the gateway to Southern Illinois. After this, there are still prairies but they’re less frequent, interspersed with uneven wooded terrain. I pass a stretch of villages built to serve as railroad depots. One is the village of my mother’s family where for years I visited twice a month and hunted in the fall and winter. Further down after I-57 briefly merges with and then splits off from I-64, I descend into the lower sixteen counties of deeper Egypt. The interstate races past offramps to once prosperous mining towns. Dean Piper’s Land Between the Rivers had assured readers that Southern Illinois possessed coal reserves for a thousand years. Its wedge of land is cradled by the great rivers that would offer access to ports from Minneapolis to the Gulf. So much for the safe bets of the past. Finally, I exit onto the East-West corridor of route 13 toward Carbondale. The highway crosses Crab Orchard Lake which had sported a fleet of sailboats with a jaunty Kennedyesque flair. The sailboats are long gone along with the hopes and aspirations of those years. An hour further south, Cairo—known to many but frequented by few—anchors Little Egypt in the shame of its racial history and sanctions our name. Go down, Moses! Many were called but few chose to go. At Cairo, the confluence of ocean-seeking waters rolls on in the penumbra of an academic beacon and region in decline. SIU was once the cultural mainstay of the region. Striving for more, we achieved less.

When I arrive in Carbondale, the first thing I do is get the key to an efficiency apartment a realtor has reserved for me. The realtor’s office is situated in the upstairs of a funeral home on Poplar Street. There are heavy furnishings, wall-to-wall carpets, lavender wallpaper, indefinable chemical odors, and solemn portraits of the business’s founders. I can imagine that their timely contact with grieving heirs facilitated the acquisition of properties which passed from family ownership to student rental. With declining enrollments, there are cheap vacancies. Student apartments are occupied by the indigent or itinerant. From this gaudy gatehouse of death, I follow the young African American manager across town to an L-shaped brick structure with two stories on the north side and a lower third on the west side, a walk-down facing the Illinois Central tracks and a rail underpass. My apartment is in the walk-down. Its depth will make it cooler, its position facing the tracks and intersection louder. Its space is small but adequate. It has a futon on which I can sleep, a kitchenette for storing cold drinks and making my morning espresso, and a small bathroom with a functioning shower. I need nothing more. Twelve years ago, I slept in a place much like this on the western edge of Berlin, commuting to Potsdam to work with Hartmut Rudolph on a Paracelsus volume. It was hot and smelly; but I was determined to get by cheaply for three weeks so that during the fourth I could transfer to nicer, more central quarters when my family joined me. I wanted to show them the Berlin of my student days. The West Berlin dormitory stank of stale cigarette smoke. Here it smells of cat. I sweep cat hair off the futon, arrange my things, open the vial of lavender oil that I’ve brought from Provence, turn on the air conditioning fan, and leave the place to air and, I hope, become habitable.

Since it’s not quite three yet, I cross under the railway overpass and make my way along sun-baked sidewalks and across half-shaded campus lawns to the splendidly expanded Morris Library and its Special Collections Room. Here my balance is restored. I’m back in my world at its most hospitable. The desks and seats are comfortable, the personnel obliging, the collections spectacular. During the presidency of Morris, there were plans for an Irish Studies Program and for an edition of the works of John Dewey. Money was available for acquisitions. The library acquired the letters of James Joyce and Dewey’s papers. One of his colleagues at Columbia was George Counts, a progressive educator recruited for a late-career appointment. From the Special Collections librarian, I request Counts’ memoir of driving an imported Ford across Soviet Russia in 1929 and the transcript of the Dewey Commission conducted in Mexico in 1937 to investigate Stalin’s monstrous charges against Trotsky. The Dewey Commission transcript and Joyce’s letters interest me as physical artifacts; but with only an hour before the library closes for the weekend, I focus on Counts’ book. It’s exactly what I need. Last summer, I made my own solo journey by train and plane across the vast Russian Federation from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka after reviewing my college Russian. I can appreciate Counts’ hardships, mishaps, and turns of luck. I am no less amazed by his naïveté. He is convinced, in the words of an early visitor to revolutionary Russia, that he has “seen the future and it works.” Counts applauds the monumental energies marshaled for transformation and modernization. The lemmings are mobilizing for their leap into the abyss. His enthusiasm pulses with the syncopated energies of the 1920s. With the brashness of a young Hemingway, he reports breaking news from a world in the making. I won’t get to the Dewey Commission transcripts before closing, but they promise a morning after reckoning with Counts’ youthful intoxication.

After the library closes, I take a quick tour of the campus woods and the Student Center building and then stroll ten minutes through the old part of campus and across the new five-way intersection that has created a traffic island with slow-timed crosswalks at the town-end. I clean up and walk fifteen minutes to the neighborhood adjacent to the old train station. Since Carbondale was never a county seat, it lacks even the relic of a central public square; but the block north of the station is a functioning countercultural island with the Longbranch Café, Global Gourmet Restaurant, a corner health food and grocery, and around the corner the anarchist Flyover with its tool library and defiant chaos. Seated on a picnic bench on the street, two black men accost me to hear out their rap routine. Their names are Rob and Row and they want nothing but my ear. Their rap is of a spooky apocalyptic inspiration, accompanied by diabolical in-your-face grimaces. After they finish, I regret not having recorded the routine of these black Jesus rappers who could scare the bejesus out of a white Sunday school class.

Earlier visits had established the Longbranch and Global Gourmet Bar and Restaurant as my reliable places of refuge. I am a little hard of hearing and the Global Gourmet bar is acoustically propitious. I already know or have spoken with some of the regulars. Some are easy to categorize: the English Department creative writing types exchanging measured admiration; young faculty treating themselves to a night on the town; locals attracted to the aura of an exotic cuisine; young guys out to impress and bed their dates. There is also an older regular cadre that regards itself as heir to the legendary 1960s, though most of them were too young to have seen much. When I tell them the dates of my time at SIU, they expect to hear their clichés confirmed and regard me with suspicion when I fail to deliver.

Tonight, on my second gin and tonic, I strike up a conversation with a round faced, round shouldered innocent who doesn’t look his thirty-five years. He comes across as borderline Asperger’s or obsessive compulsive, nervously arranging his coins on the bar in symmetrical designs. I hear that he is the prime caregiver of his mother, a former SIU faculty member. He has family roots in Hardin County, the least populated, most forested heart of darkness in all Little Egypt, a county I want to explore. We talk for a while. He is fascinated that I taught German. He remembers that his mother once sent him to foreign language summer camp. He notices me jotting in my notebook and wants to know what I’m writing. I explain that I grew up and studied here and am organizing my impressions. This seems to intrigue him greatly, so I probe him for information about the rural counties and ask if he has contacts that could benefit me. Coming from Hardin County gives him bragging rights, but the relations are out of touch, the contacts inactive. Lots of talk and some excitement on his part but nothing gained for me.

I have a standard question which I put to people I meet here: “Some regions are like the Delta, the Ozarks, or Appalachia: cultural as well as geographical entities. In other areas, however, southern, northern, eastern, or western is nothing but an abstract direction which can be applied to any space. So, which is Southern Illinois? Is it more like the Delta or more like southern Iowa, a mere coordinate on a map?” Some people think that it’s just the southern part of the state. Hardly anyone identifies with the name “Little Egypt,” though signs everywhere still allude to it. Others attest that it is distinct, but when I ask in what ways, they come out with the bromides of our national polarization. They say people here are friendlier. It’s safer, meaning perhaps whiter, though no one puts it in those terms. Others draw the distinction that Carbondale is more diverse and tolerant; the surrounding countryside a bastion of undifferentiated bigotry. I point out that on three sides, Southern Illinois is more clearly bounded than the Ozarks or Appalachia. Is there really no “there” there? History, agriculture, and economics separate us from northern Illinois. Why then our weak sense of identity? I sometimes ask as well: why is the sense of identity nowhere weaker than in the region’s intellectual center?

Having reached my two-drink limit, I meander back to my apartment. But the thought of turning in early in this odd-smelling crypt puts me off. This is the time of year when college towns empty out between terms. The campus and student-oriented streets are haunted by the missing crowds. I decide to explore the neighborhood on foot, so I cross beneath the railroad overpass to a desolate expanse illuminated by glaring streetlamps to explore the remnants of the strip which grew to connect campus and town. There are surviving fragments of the old commercial-residential zone and the new irregular traffic island created at the town end of campus when route 51 was expanded and rerouted to expedite north-south transit. The restructuring cut the campus off abruptly from its urban surroundings. The strip between campus and town symbolizes and isa manifestation of impersonal exploitation. When I was a student here in the mid-1960s, the aura of postwar Existentialism was still in vogue. You could see campus intellectuals ostentatiously reading Sartre, Heidegger, or William Barrett’s Irrational Man—a rather vague book that shaped the thinking of my generation. I embraced the idea that the human condition is characterized by alienation, by the agonizing freedom of Sartre or the Geworfenheit, the “thrownness” of Heidegger. No matter how ambiguous these terms proved under scrutiny, they expressed my overwhelming sense of loneliness and estrangement. I was the outsider, cast into this world but not of it. The space into which I had been “thrown” was structured by random forces blindly powered by exploitation. The ugliness of the commercial strip between campus and town was and still is ideally configured to embody alienation and exploitation. As in the “campus towns” of so many of our universities, everything is cheap, incoherent, and transparently exploitive.

The irregularly sloping city block of the traffic island draws me with its promise of symbolic sanctuary. It’s not Broadway and not the “Night Scenes” of Robert Duncan; but the island has an underground oasis of conviviality. I’m for the companionable anonymity of the bar stool, the word or two with the host behind the counter, the glances exchanged with fellow patrons. I’ll drink one more gin and tonic before calling it a night. When I’m about to leave, a woman two barstools away makes conversational overtures. She is a hospital lab technician from a small Southern Illinois town which I know. She has a drinking problem and a South African boyfriend of German extraction. Like a seasoned diplomat, I initiate lateral relations with the boyfriend. When I learn that he speaks German, we converse in the language. Evidently, she feels excluded which only eggs her on. I crave conversation and maintain a precarious balance between her and her congenial young friend. Shots are offered and knocked back before I leave on my way to what now seems like my hideout. I arrange my bed and pass out.

In the middle of the night, my sleep is broken by the horrendous clanging and prolonged whistle blasts of a train. I know that I will learn to sleep through these thundering blasts. Train sounds are predictable and therefore reassuring. Before going back to sleep, I try to sort out the various comments I’ve heard during the evening, connecting them to their speakers. I discover that I can’t quite assign comments with confidence. Who was it that insinuated that rural people were not only arming themselves but organizing into militias? To what purpose and where? Did I hear or overhear it? I must be exaggerating some insinuation that I’ve picked up elsewhere. The train blasts have receded now, but from one floor up and a door or two down I hear a raging voice. It intensifies, recedes, and then roars back in a cycle suggesting mental imbalance. Common anger focuses on an object, climaxes, and then either issues in a fight or dissipates; but this rage is fueled by some inner source that never loses its revolving fury. I switch the air conditioner fan on high to drown out the voice. I check the door bolt, take Melatonin, and, crushed by my exhaustion, sink back onto the futon and into a deep sleep. As a student, I trained myself to sleep through noise. It’s a precious ability that few have. I can concentrate in noisy bars and doze through commotions that rattle others. My obliviousness is a feat of willful suppression.

I wake up refreshed and eager to begin my first full day in Carbondale. As an early riser, I can make coffee and shower at leisure before going to work. Work means beginning as an Uber driver, which requires nothing more than sitting in my car parked outside, turning on my app, and waiting for an offer to show up with directions for picking up a passenger. I begin at seven. The minutes are long as I wait for the first summons. Finally, my screen lights up and I swipe to accept and receive driving directions. It goes reasonably well, though the directions are sometimes confusing or even incorrect. Fortunately, the passengers don’t mind offering instructions. Young people are on their way to work. Older people without a functioning car are running errands. College students are on their way home after a night out. I’ve been told that the late shift is busier and pays better, but I don’t want to transport the bar crowd that gets sick so often that Uber has to offer a subsidy for cleaning up vomit.

I soon realize that the benefit of driving is inseparable from its drawback and peril. Passengers talk freely to the driver. The situation is akin to that of the bartender, hairdresser, or priest confessor. The relationship is defined and limited. The passenger is in a liminal place between the relaxation of home and the confining stress of work or meeting. The transition releases thoughts and feelings which can be expressed without inhibition to the driver. Some passengers are testy. Most are outgoing and quite interesting. Since I’m not sure what I’m doing here, these conversations give me a sense of spreading my net abroad and penetrating the barrier separating public from private. Unfortunately, my interest in conversation distracts me from the driving instructions. Once, in mid conversation, I switch into the next lane too abruptly and a cop gives me a warning ticket. The best rides take me down route 13 to Marion, Carterville, or the regional airport. They pay better and offer more conversational ease. But even those rides can be frustrating. Just when the conversation gets interesting, it comes to an end. Any attempt to prolong it would violate an unspoken taboo. The driver-passenger relationship is as segregated as the psychiatrist-patient relationship. After three or four hours of driving, I’ve earned my brunch. I’m in the mood for some quiet reading and reflection.

After a satisfying beginning as an Uber driver and a leisurely brunch at the Longbranch, I make up my mind to procure reading material for my down time of waiting between gigs. I know just what I need. Crossing the Eurasian landmass last summer, I carried a Russian selection of Chekhov’s stories with me. The guiding idea of that journey was to replicate and honor Chekhov’s trek across Siberia to visit and report on the prison population of the Far East. His stories always bear rereading. For my leisure moments between rides here I prefer to read him in English to avoid having to look up Russian words. Barnes and Noble offers a cheap collection of his stories, all worth revisiting. The steady, dependable diction of the Constance Garnett translations is like hearing the voice of an old English nanny familiar from childhood. It was through the Garnett translations that I encountered the world of the Russian classics as a teenager. Always a great observer of humanity as it really is, Chekhov reconnects my last year’s journey with this year’s research and lends resonance to the moment. Nothing that I’m doing now would have been too banal or absurd for the attention of this great humanist. Still, Chekhov offers no roadmap for research. I decide to begin by visiting places featured in Land Between the Rivers.

In the afternoon, I drive south to the town of Cobden in Union County. I know there is a museum of local history there. I’m hoping to ferret out the origins and family names of a colony of Austrian Lutherans who settled here in the nineteenth century and built a quaint church in a remote place which they called Kornthal, “valley of grain.” There is a photograph of it in Land Between the Rivers. I find the museum, but their knowledge is limited; and they suggest that I come back on Sunday to speak to a lady who has compiled the available information on the Kornthal Austrians. I promise to do so. I also learn that the population of Union County is one eighth Hispanic, consisting of legal or illegal immigrants from Michoacán who came here to work in the peach harvests and became a settled and, it seems, relatively accepted presence in the county. A taqueria next door does a brisk business, except on Sundays when the Mexican owner’s adherence to the Sabbath forbids opening. Walking past the taco stand, I notice a small party of strict Mennonites enjoying the spicy and inexpensive fare. The man is older middle-aged, stern and suspendered. The two women, presumably his wife and daughter, look as if they could be the same age, clad in their ankle-length light blue dresses, with their hair bound in the lacy bun that signals female modesty in their sect. The women are less forbidding than the man.

I set off in search of the little wooden church, passing through the decrepit double cities of Anna and Jonesboro. I once brought my brother here for alcoholic detox only to be told that I had to take him to East Saint Louis instead, an all-night ordeal during which he sobered up and once again became the brother of my childhood, comradely and cordial. After stopping for directions a few times, I’m on the right track. The church and site of the vanished village are in a tiny uncultivated valley. The soil couldn’t have been the attraction. The surrounding forested hills were reminiscent of Upper Austria from which the persecuted Protestants had emigrated. Here is their restored, freshly painted church. It’s called a Betsaal, a hall of prayer, not a church. The regulation of the Catholic Austrian government only allowed the Protestant remnant a minimal confessional presence. From my research and visits with my wife’s family in Upper Austria, I know about that region and its embattled Protestants. They had been the majority in their country three centuries earlier. The Counterreformation forced them to reconvert or go underground or into exile. Austrians have a reputation for an easy-going acceptance of fate. There is an anecdote made famous by the critic and dramatist Karl Kraus: when the Hapsburg Empire was on the verge of collapse at the end of World War I, a military dispatch making the rounds reversed expectations by announcing that, “the situation is hopeless, but not serious.” Anecdotes like that one play on the Austrians’ reputation for frivolity. The Upper Austrian Lutherans, however, were nothing if not serious. To preserve their faith, they inclined to a theology so stringent and manichaean that it was considered heretical even by their orthodox German Lutheran coreligionists.

Supposedly, someone in a house nearby has a key or knows how to get one. I see no hint that anyone is in charge. From two small houses surrounded by junked equipment I hear children’s voices. The houses form a single unit. I squeeze between cherished junk which includes everything from fishnets to a rusted-out washing machine. One sign reads, “No phone, no gas. Don’t even ask!” A second, “Friends welcome, relatives by appointment.” A third, “Caution. Grandparents at play.” In back, there is an above-ground swimming tank in which a boy is submerged while his sister sits on the edge. He climbs out dripping wet and goes inside to alert his grandmother who is not “at play” but obviously joyful in the knowledge that her grandchildren are. She knows only that the church had once belonged to “Australians.” I have nothing else to ask and go my way, but the image of innocent delight sticks with me as I drive back to Carbondale. After a while, it occurs to me why this scene was so magical. It reminded me of Wild and Woolly in a children’s book that we read to our children when they were small. Wild and Woolly dig a hole so deep that they come out on the other side of the world. On their way home, they enjoy the hospitality of all sorts of eccentric persons who include a fortuneteller who could have been inspired by the sight of the grandmother at play.

Back in Carbondale, it’s still early. The days are long. The time passes slowly. I decide to drive north to Du Quoin to visit a cousin. Arriving there, I realize that I don’t have her address. I gamble that if I ask a few citizens, someone might know her. At a gas station it works. An older guy had had children who were taught by Ruth Ann. He even offers to lead the way. I follow him to her address, but now my luck runs out. A neighbor informs me that she and her family are on vacation in Florida. I turn around and start back to Carbondale. Halfway there, I see a sign for Royalton. From Land Between the Rivers, I know there is an Eastern Orthodox church built by Slavic miners, still in use as such. I detour to Royalton. There are several bars and churches, among them an onion-domed one with what looks like a Byzantine iconostasis in front, in the place reserved by other churches for a clever exhortation. I photograph this token of the Slavic world and reflect on the diversity which the mines brought to the region. Only the fact that these people, whatever else they may have been, were above all one thing—white—prevented their diversity from stamping its character on the region itself.

Approaching Carbondale on a Saturday evening, I reminisce about what this place meant to me as an 18-year old freshman in 1965. SIU was my gateway to the world. Alienation was the precondition of experiencing the world on my own terms. From my first day on campus, I knew I had entered a more dimensional territory with vastly broader horizons than the small town I grew up in. From that first summer on—it was a hot summer like this one—I worked twenty hours a week at the Stenographic Service where Faner Hall now sprawls. At a dollar an hour, the minimum wage, I earned enough to cover most expenses beyond tuition which was covered by a state scholarship. That first summer I lived at Thompson Point. My classes included Physics and Sociology. I was impressed by new insights about groups and individuals. As a philosophy major, I took German, which determined my life and career. As Goethe said to Eckermann, the world was young then. Politicization was in the air, though I only became active after I went to Hamburg with an exchange scholarship for my junior year abroad during the fabled academic year 1967-68. After my first summer here, I moved into cheap off-campus housing and lived on my own. On Friday nights, the Varsity Cinema had a late show with European and experimental films. I saw Virgin Spring, Last Year at Marienbad, and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. I was enchanted with Joyce’s Dubliners and fellin love with an older fellow Stenographic Service employee who indulged me like a big sister. We talked about Lawrence Durrell and the Beat Poets and listened to Beyond the Fringe. The Sixties were still innocent, not yet dominated by drugs, anarchic hedonism, and left-wing sectarianism. The times were for sure a-changin’ but the new times hadn’t arrived yet. The pressure was intense. Once on a Friday night, I boarded the Greyhound bus for my hometown with a half pint of whisky. Finishing it off before I arrived, I was sick all weekend. Instead of conniving to provide a smooth “college experience,” Student Affairs Officers should put out the word: Come to college to wander in the wilderness for forty days and forty nights, to dream dreams and suffer exalted visions. I suffered anxiety attacks and wandered the Carbondale streets for hours at night.

Back again, I launch my bar tour and make conversation with people I’ve met before; but since they can’t pigeonhole me, they are getting suspicious. I see the round-shouldered guy at the end of the bar. He nods in my direction and I see that he has adopted my habit of carrying a notebook and writing in it. Despite my explanations, I can tell that my acquaintances here are wondering who I am and what I want. Those are good questions. My guiding light in coming here (aside from Don Quixote and Rip Van Winkle) was Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickeled and Dimed. I’m convinced that useful employment offers a special access to the life of a community. I also believe that if you seek some particular object, even if it’s unimportant in itself or inaccessible, just by seeking and asking you learn things. This is the logic of the private detective who stumbles upon clues. Seek and you shall find. But when I follow my philologically trained nose, it leads me back to a library or archive, to my beloved books. I’m expecting to settle into what I call senior citizen bohème: a taxi driver in the morning, a scholar in the afternoon, a wanderer in the evening, and a café patron or barfly at night. It’s the romanticism of the retiree. Live fast and die old. But not too old. In his late-career memoir of his solo journeys, Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck said it best: “Lingering on the stage too long is bad theater—and bad living.” For now, I’m ready to call it a night.

On Sunday morning, I’m expecting to transport a church-going crowd to and from church attendance in late morning. Business is slow. Long waiting periods in my car give me time to immerse myself in Chekhov. Anton Pavlovich speaks to me in the voice of an old friend retelling half-forgotten tales of incomparable richness. From my teenager’s summer reading to last summer’s trek across Siberia, he only gets richer with rereading. I vaguely recall his story “On the Road.” Rereading it now after my solo trek across Russia, I notice both its quintessential Russianness and its universality. Its protagonist Lihachev is an archetypal figure of the Russian intelligentsia. A snowstorm strands him and his little daughter at a way station where a spoiled twenty-year old aristocratic lady also waits out the storm. Obsessed with his guilt and failure, Lihachev pours out a confession of all the radical enthusiasms that have possessed him throughout life, wasting his estate, destroying his family, and driving him onward to the coal mines of the steppe where bleak employment now awaits him. The young lady comes under his spell. Suddenly her world is full of marvels and magic, ideals and intellect. She pleads with him not to sacrifice himself in the mines of the barren steppe; but Lihachev is driven on by his quest for truth and meaning.

I finish the story over coffee at the Longbranch and recall my transforming encounters with people that I later lost touch with. First was June at the Stenographic Service. Then in 1966 there was an older SIU student who lived in a basement room crammed with the modernist classics which I learned to love. There was June’s new husband, David Wiley, an aspiring writer. I spent time with the two of them in the French Quarter in the summer of 1967. In Europe, there was the half-French, half-German-Jewish student who had been exiled from Paris after the May-June events of ‘68. We shared quarters in Barcelona and carried on endless discussions in back alley dives along las Ramblas between playing the pinballs. Franco’s guardia civil still patrolled the streets. In Urbana, there was Mike Hanagan. I got to know him in the summer of 1969. He was a committed adherent of Leon Trotsky’s Fourth International and rising star of the Socialist Workers Party. We collaborated in the antiwar movement which was just then arriving at its climax. I recall now that Mike was from the Southern Illinois coal town of West Frankfort and, like me, familiar with the coal miners’ life. My alcoholic brother worked as a miner after being discharged from the Vietnam-era navy. Since West Frankfort is hardly an hour’s drive away, I decide to go there soon on a weekday when the offices are open and ask about his family.

On Sunday afternoon, I drive back to Cobden. I’ve been told that someone will be on duty in the Union County Historical Society Museum who has gathered the available information on the Austrian Protestant immigrants who founded the Kornthal settlement. She is Ruth Wanderstad, a great source of information not only on the Austrians but also on the large Hispanic population of the county who were drawn here by the need for orchard workers. While I write out the names and origins of the Austrian immigrants, Ruth gives me an informative lecture on the Union County Hispanic population who came here from Michoacán to work in the harvests. They have since diversified and integrated themselves into the fabric of local society. Eventually, I hope I can make contact with their population. First, I want to try to build on the names and places available for the Austrians.

After some research assisted by Gottfried Wimmer of the Evangelisches Museum in Upper Austria, I retrieve the plaintive voices of Matthias and Theresia Lichtenwagner and Andreas Pötzlberger who arrived in these parts in the early 1850s. As devout Protestants, they fared better than the political progressives who were soon disillusioned with the political climate of the new country. The Austrians’ letters written from Jonesboro to their families in the old country are simple and beautiful, detailed yet allegorical. The Lichtenwagners write in German of exiting from “Egypt into the Land of Canaan.” They record precise details of purchases, way stations, trees, and houses. In Austria, they had had to worry about taxes and interest payments. Here, you can “strive above all for the Kingdom of God and His justice, and the rest will take care of itself.” Pötzlberger is relieved to be free of torments and oppression. He is satisfied with the fertility of the soil. Southern Illinois soil is of course not so rich. The descendants of the Austrians will nonetheless thrive by planting orchards and employing Mexican immigrants to harvest them. “You are a hidden God,” they write, “but we must join in your praise.” Iterations of a mythical Egypt haunt the human condition. Egyptian exile is our universal alienation. Divested of the Edenic expectations of youth, we seek the past in the future and the future in the past.

I drive back to Carbondale to attend the chapter meeting of the Southern Illinois Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organization I joined a year ago and endeavored to collaborate with back home. The word “socialist” in my opinion should be a wake-up call to a spineless liberal opposition. It seems to me virtually irrefutable that the financial, insurance, and pharmaceutical industries deserve to be de-privatized. Their criminal mismanagement has resulted in immense suffering. The subprime mortgage collapse and the epidemic of prescription drug addiction both resulted from calculated greed and have inflicted more harm than the nation’s enemies in several of its wars. The insurance industry continues to place profit above the relief of suffering.

That said, I realized some time ago that I am not a good fit for this young organization. The demands of gender identity politics defy my comprehension. DSA members in Bloomington are expected to state their gender identification at the start of meetings. It makes sense to me to reject the nauseating gender roles imposed by our culture; and I would defend the dignity of any nonconformist, sexual or otherwise; but the transgender claim to a status that goes beyond personal nonconformism strikes me as a corollary of the capitalist impulse to brand every human asset and assimilate it to the status of the commodity. Gender in this sense manifests commodity-like associations with fluidity and property. It is owned, altered, and branded. Unlike the transgender, the individualist as such claims no certification. A phalanx of recognition-seeking eccentrics would be a contradiction in terms. Transgender advocates might reply to this that the commodification of human assets was not their idea: they are merely taking control of the process forced upon them. Debating such issues openly is discouraged in leftist circles.

I have a simpler problem in relating to this young socialist organization. I’m not cut out for leadership and I don’t care for the role of the know-it-all spoiler, criticizing from the sidelines. In Carbondale, I am pleased to meet the like-minded, but I soon realize that I would face the same mismatch here. The local reading group has chosen a text with an outmoded notion of early modern history. My cautious criticism comes across as patronizing rather than tactful. Later in the evening at my underground bar, I am seated within earshot of two graduate students who are racking their brains for ways to advance and promote their careers. I’m tempted to offer them advice but wisely refrain.

Monday morning is only my fourth day here, but it already feels routine. By the end of the day, my activities will have settled into a pattern that remains constant. I start as an Uber driver at seven. By eleven, I’ve stressed my nerves and earned enough. I don’t need the money. Yet the work induces in me a feverish hunter-gatherer mentality. As a professor, I never imagined a connection between the work I did and the salary at my disposal. I did my duty as I understood it, researching and writing all summer without pay and meeting with students at their request. Here, I take note of what I earn from every ride. One more gig, I think, and I’ll have enough for brunch. Three more gigs: enough for my drinks and meal in the evening. The main thing, however, is my curiosity about passengers. As a rule, they are the working poor. Eighty percent are young African Americans. In most cases, they are cheerful and friendly and in nearly all interesting in one way or another. Here is Kanesha, the young mother of two on her way to her job, apologetic after being delayed by the needs of her smallest. Here is the young veteran named Moral, happy to work for U-Haul after a stint as a bouncer. He enlightens me with funny stories about the occupational hazards of a bouncer. A young lady from the South Side of Chicago is on her way to the first day of a summer internship at a business between Carbondale and Marion. Since my app fails to register the location properly, I take over finding directions. When we arrive in the nick of time, she pauses to thank me graciously before rushing to begin her summer employment. I wish her luck thinking of my children. These young black people are launched in life, thrilled to be part of this provincial society.

There is the jarring clash of racist comments I hear near campus. A business owner on Illinois Street complains about the declining enrollments and lost purchasing power; but the target of his most acid comments are: “too many thugs from Chicago.” A fellow bar patron to whom I mention my apartment address replies, “Oh, in the ghetto!” An older person explains that black people were once bussed from Cairo to work in the Union County orchards, “until they realized they could get a check from the government for doing nothing.” Never mind that they were bussed in and out because they weren’t welcome to spend the night; or that white people shunned the same work. Cairo is and always has been a sore spot in Southern Illinois. When I was growing up, no one went there or talked about it, though we all knew where it was; and we assumed that its name was associated with our being Little Egypt. I’ve visited the Mississippi Delta and know its history of racist violence. But I suspect that a white person in the Delta would be less likely to ignore the existence of black people. Without them, there would be no Delta. In Southern Illinois where we have a tradition of sundown cities, we managed to pretend that black people were an aberration. The few black families in the town where I grew up were “well behaved,” therefore not typical “negroes.” Such thinking persists.

The comment that I’m living in “the ghetto” gives me pause. Most of the other occupants of my half-empty apartment complex and the ones across the street are black and young with a few middle aged older white residents who look like recovering alcoholics. I always eye them wondering which one was the source of that unhinged rage I heard on my first night here. The young black occupants all seem caught up in personal crises, engaged in loud impassioned cell phone conversations while standing on the motel-style outdoor access balconies here or in the apartment complex across the street. From the sounds of it, it’s boyfriend or girlfriend trouble. They’re so caught up in their personal problems that they barely respond to my greeting when I pass them on my way to or from my car. When I politely complain to the cleaning staff about the inadequate cleaning job before I moved into my apartment, the white cleaning lady who runs the service respectfully promises to see to it. Her tone seems to say, “How were we supposed to know that you are a respectable white man?”

In the hottest afternoon hours, I repair to the cool comforts of the Special Collections Library, where folders of priceless documents await my perusal. I’ve reserved folders from the Dewey, Piscator, and Joyce collections, mainly in order to examine their documents as physical artifacts, but I am attracted to the contents of the typescript records of the Dewey Commission Hearings. They counterbalance the enthusiastic reports of Counts from the late 1920s. It is paradoxical, this interest of mine in the drama of the international Communist movement. I’m fascinated by the martyrs and heretics of the decade of the Spanish Civil War, the first Five Year Plan, and Stalin’s Purges. It is paradoxical because I was introduced to Communism by reading an anticommunist classic as a teenager. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is a narrative experiment in moral reasoning in the tradition of Dostoyevsky. Its questions transcend Communism. How can seemingly humane premises lead to inhuman ends? Does the end justify the means? What is human guilt? How could the resolute and principled be led to self-denunciation on preposterous charges? Koestler compels the thoughtful reader to ask not only what was wrong with Marxism, but what was right with it. My father was a struggling manufacturer of oil tanks. It depressed me already as a child that every activity was reducible to a competition between winners and losers. Looking at the oil fields, I could see that the demon of profit transformed pristine nature into grimy raw material and put every asset up for sale. Now we know that the only limit is the exhaustion of the planet, the implicit term the destruction of life itself. The end convicts the means.

The crudely typed transcript of the Dewey Commission Hearings reminds me of Darkness at Noon. Here is the genius of the October Revolution and Russian Civil War: a bespectacled, goatee-wearing Jewish intellectual. Hounded by Stalin, he directs the adherents of his Fourth International from exile and pleads his case before a makeshift tribunal in order to establish his innocence and the rectitude of his revolutionary workers’ movement. Like Koestler’s anticommunist classic, the hearings compel the reader to evaluate on its own terms an ideology in theory and practice. It’s become customary to write off Trotsky or Communism in the simplest moralistic terms. We would resist doing the same with any comparable figures from history or literature. What critic could have been so crude as to write off Henry VIII and his opportunist palatine Thomas Cromwell of the Hilary Mantel novels as “bad guys” and therefore unworthy of thoughtful presentation? Trotsky in Coyoacán is a figure of Shakespearean grandeur and complexity, a mixture of John Calvin, Ivan Karamazov, and King Lear. For more than a week, my afternoons are devoted to the life and thought of the prophet in exile. Gradually, it dawns on me that the forgotten story unfolding in the transcripts has a subtle connection with my own past and a prophetic relation to the future. What was at stake was a capacity for international solidarity and large-scale planning of a kind without which no coordinated response to our present planetary crisis is conceivable.

By late afternoon, my eyes are getting tired. I go for long walks either through the adjacent campus woods or around the Thompson Point lakes and residential area or out at the state park in Giant City. It’s only a twenty-minute drive to the well-preserved country store fronts of the village of Makanda, ensconced in a deep wooded valley and fronting on the railway line. I have coffee or ice cream, look for presents for my wife, then drive into the forest, park my car, and hike on one or more of the well-marked trails. The sandstone bluffs are overgrown with a variety of deciduous trees, the forest floor carpeted with ferns and undergrowth. The peculiar character of the Southern Illinois forest lies in not being dominated by one characteristic tree such as the Alpine spruce or Russian birch. What seems characteristic is the sensation of a green light flooding the chasms where the bluffs yield to open space. The canopy of one dominant species doesn’t make the forest floor dark and bare.

When it’s too hot for hiking, I drive to West Frankfort, Benton, Herrin, or Sesser. In West Frankfort, I ask at a gas station if anyone has heard of the Hanagan family. I am advised to ask in the office of the utility company. Fifty years ago was before their time, so I am told to cross the street to a senior citizens’ center where retired people play cards. I am referred from table to table. An older lady who can hardly take her eyes off her hand recalls that the family may have lived in the nearby city of Benton. I drive on to Benton, stopping at the public library on the outskirts. They recommend inquiring at the courthouse. I park just off the square. A line of young white men in orange jumpsuits is being escorted into a courtroom. I expect to be treated rudely by the guards, but they are as friendly as everyone else I meet. They encourage me to inquire inside. I ask at the County Clerk’s Office. They know nothing but are sure googling will help. I’ve tried this already. The name is too common to produce definitive results; but since there is indeed one Michael Hanagan in the area, I try the number, to no effect. I am dispatched to the local museum. Among the volunteers someone remembers the family but not what became of it. In less than an hour I’ve gone through a cross-section of a community, talking to young and old and getting some idea of local concerns (whether or not to build a new courthouse).

I really have become a detective of sorts, if only I knew what I’m looking for. I’m onto something but don’t quite know what it is. I suspect there is some backdoor leading from my Egyptian darkness into the macrocosm of world history with all its incredible tragedy. I make an early morning appointment with a former SIU chancellor who is now in semi-retirement at the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute. The institute is just behind the Student Center via a short, forested pathway. It’s a glass-walled, single-story building. As I wait, a friendly receptionist graciously offers me a bottle of water. I have the cane and Panama hat that I carried on my Russian journey last summer. I tell her about rationing my water on the Transsiberian and dealing with Russian officials. The ex-chancellor issues forth to greet me: a small, courtly man nearing eighty. He makes an impression somewhere between the elder statesman version of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda in a cotton summer suit—highly regarded, but like me a relic.

He has spent his entire professional life at SIU, but he has preserved his Arkansas drawl. Both things testify to an unpretentious loyalty. As a former top administrator, he knows how to listen and offer useful suggestions. Though I know that what I’m telling him is a bit over the top—namely, that having traveled across the Eurasian landmass, I now want to explore the region I come from—he seems to be genuinely interested both in my present plans and in my past travels. When I tell him that I believe productive labor gives a person access to a community; and that I am working as an Uber driver and plan to seek employment in nursing homes and listen to older people’s stories, and even to work for the farmers bringing in hay in late summer, he wistfully recalls the jobs of his youth and admits that, though from a rural area, he never worked in the hay harvest. As for my plans to campaign in the coming year for the Democratic candidate—who I hope will be Elizabeth Warren—he scoffs that people are likely to shoot me. I consider this nonsense and laugh. We part on the best of terms. I take his indulgent parting smile as a cue to look at my situation from his point of view.

He has a point, more than he knows. Not about Warren (though I’ll find out that the local Democrats generally do have a siege mentality): he is right to smile at my self-presentation, including my ideal of harvesting hay. This is not just my attempt to return to the world of my youth. It’s my attempt to take refuge in the world of the nineteenth-century Russian novels which I read as a teenager when I worked for farmers on hot summer afternoons and read Tolstoy in the cool of the night. I was Levin, mowing hay with the peasants and sleeping on haystacks beneath the Russian stars that gleam in Fet’s mystical poems, their mysterious stellar choruses trembling softly like signals from the great world to the small. The former chancellor has no idea just how right he is. I’m Stepan Trofimovich from Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, the rootless old liberal modeled on Alexander Herzen or Ivan Turgenev who, bewildered by the cruelty of post-Emancipation Russia, sets off in old age to encounter “the people” about whom he and his associates have spent their lives pontificating. In French, that is. Yes, I’m quixotic. So what? I’ve crossed all Russia alone and I know that I’ll pursue my plan to some conclusion here. There will be some sort of revelation, light or dark, at the end of the tunnel, even if getting there does me in.

With my growing absorption in old documents and the past, I am less eager to embark on an engaged conversation with the bar crowd. I still spend evenings in bars or cafés. It would be unbearable to sit alone in my apartment; but I realize that my experience is remote even from that of older patrons. Taking breaks from my documents, I cut through the campus woods to the Student Center, buy coffee at Starbucks, and sit and read on the terrace in the shadow of what was once an old growth forest. Here I have the feeling that I’m one of the last guests in a subsidized resort or asylum. Meanwhile, the crudely typed documents are beginning to convey to me the smells and light of Mexico. I can recall it so vividly.

Since the weather in Mexico City is predictable, the house in Coyoacán is no doubt filled with diffuse sunlight at 10 a.m. on April 10, when the 78-year old philosopher convenes the anomalous gathering. Dewey’s plainspoken gravitas prevents the affair from descending into political theatrics. In opening, the lean-faced Vermonter with the shock of center-parted white hair thanks the government of Lázaro Cárdenas for allowing the proceedings. The year is 1937 and we are in the revolutionary Mexico of radical muralists and anti-interventionist politics, an independent-minded republic that grants asylum to exiled revolutionaries and persecuted antifascists. Trotsky looks intense yet somehow comedic with his round glasses, Groucho hair, and goatee. He stands accused of selling out the first workers’ state to German and Japanese imperial interests and conspiring to commit terrorist acts to destroy the legitimate leadership of his country.

He recounts his life in simple words to the commissioners. It’s a revolutionary career of a kind familiar at least since 1848, rivaled in its drama only by the wanderings of the great anarchist Bakunin. It began forty years before, when young Lev Bronstein organized an illegal workers’ association. The ensuing life of Bronstein-Trotsky became a never-ending serial of flight, imprisonment, banishment, exile, and expulsion from one country to another. It climaxes in the 1917 October revolution and in his brilliant leadership of the Red Army in the Russian Civil War, but this is then followed again by marginalization, exile, and persecution. Always and everywhere, his existence is marked by political struggle, agitation, and solidarity with the oppressed.

The accused emphasizes his rejection of individual terror, his loyalty to the party of Lenin, and his unbending opposition to the war that broke out in 1914. Everywhere he encounters comrades whom he remembers with warmth. The German sailors with whom he shares quarters in a Canadian prison camp in Nova Scotia are “very good fellows—and we became friendly on the basis of the agitation of Karl Liebknecht.” All his words about the workers or his comrades express this same warmth. Every word about his relationship to the international movement reveals the same consistency. He is a man of two great slogans embodied in the titles of his books: The Revolution Betrayed and The Permanent Revolution. This is how his admirer and biographer Isaac Deutscher understood him.

The old revolutionary charms his listeners. Asked if the rumor is true that in New York he exercised the craft of a tailor, he replies, “Unfortunately, I did not learn any productive trade in my life.” Spoken by a man of inexhaustible energy and accomplishment, this elicits laughter from the commissioners; but do they also notice how seriously the response was meant? For the Marxist intellectual, all political authority proceeds from the laboring masses for whom the intellectual speaks only in proxy like a theologian for his congregation. The theology might possess the force of law. Any deviation from it might be gravely sanctioned. Yet justification resides only in the faith and works of productive labor. The revolutionary theologian therefore occupies a precarious position. If the cause falters, who could be more to blame than its guiding light? The cause must triumph. If it does not, its theory is false; and to propagate a false doctrine is to act in effect as the devil’s secret agent. Despite failures, Trotsky adheres to his faith in the imminence of the international revolution. To opponents, he is an arch fiend; to Isaac Deutscher, a prophet who speaks not only for himself but for a world hovering between war and peace, fascism and socialism, regression and progress. Are those alternatives no longer real?

Within the lengthy hearings, certain moments of great dignity and drama stand out. At one point, the question is asked whether Stalin strikes at his enemies by persecuting their kin. When Trotsky affirms that this is so, his legal counsel asks that it be entered into the record that this is the “opinion” of the accused. It is not an opinion, objects the accused, but rather an experience which he has paid for with the lives of two of his children.

In a morning session of April 16, Trotsky has clarified his rejection of individual terror and rationalized mass terror as purely defensive. In the afternoon session, Dewey reads from a pamphlet:

Terror can play a great affirmative role if it is based on a correct political line and promotes the dissolution of reactionary groups. As Bolsheviks we fully understand the role of the revolutionary terror. We applied it to the bourgeoisie and their agents, the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, and not for one moment do we intend in the future to renounce the revolutionary terror as against enemies of the proletariat.

Dewey then addresses Trotsky: “I am merely asking you whether there is anything inconsistent in that with what you stated this morning…?” In the morning session, Trotsky had explained that effective political organization of the proletariat makes terror unnecessary and undesirable. Now he replies, “I don’t remember all this document, but it was not signed by me. It is after my expulsion.” Dewey counters: “Yours is the first name there.”

Trotsky’s contradictions are laid bare. Terror is excluded by Bolshevik strategy, but those who oppose it, whatever they call themselves, are “agents of the bourgeoisie,” thus appropriate targets of Bolshevik terror. He himself embraces the premise that the Soviet Union is the world’s great hope and that its survival necessitates political unity. Trotsky is hoist on his own petard. One can imagine how he might have been broken by some brutal NKVD thug as in Koestler’s novel, where the banal fanatic Gletkin lays out the confession to be signed by the Old Bolshevik Rubashov. Trotsky is assassinated in his Mexican exile in 1940. (Cf. The Case of Leon Trotsky, p. 385.) The logic of the means replacing the ends is hardly peculiar to Communism. In ignoring such questions, we fail to recognize our own dilemmas.

I was never more than a marginal participant, swept along in the political currents of my time, inept in the skills of organization and leadership and too conflicted about the movements to immerse myself in them. However, reading about Trotsky in Coyoacán does remind me of my visits with my Mexican friends forty-five years ago. Since they worked full time, I passed the days at a bookstore on the Alameda Central, or at the National University. Once, in the spring of 1972, I spontaneously joined a demonstration which began at the Universidad Nacional Autónomaand continued on the Avenida de la Reforma. Joining a demonstration in a foreign country—certainly if one embraces its objectives—is akin to attending a mass. The act of joining in, of standing, moving, chanting, and listening as part of a crowd allays one’s sense of isolation. I noticed this recently in France when I found myself alone in a Provencal town at Easter. I am not a Christian, but I don’t regret experiencing the lilting hymns and liturgy of a language just foreign enough to register equally as sound and sense. A demonstration is no less a solemn ceremony. I recall marching shoulder to shoulder on the Avenida de la Reforma in 1972, chanting in unison “un pueblo unido nunca será vencido.” It was the first demonstration after another thathad resulted in the slaughter of dozens of demonstrators the previous year—events that are shown in the recent film Roma. Belonging makes us human. Solidarity, like religion, is a liberating adherence by choice. Choice and solidarity can unfortunately favor humanity or inhumanity.

In the afternoons, I am drawn back to the old mining towns. Their elaborate but fading architecture testifies to erstwhile prosperity. In Sesser, a tiny place with an Italianate “opera house,” I ask if any of the many local coal mines are still in operation and am told all have closed. In Herrin, I notice that the streetlamps bear the Italian colors. In this town with its history of strike violence and radical trade unionism, many inhabitants are descended from Italian immigrants. On a downtown street corner, I find a café which surpasses the Longbranch in beauty and coziness: high paneled ceiling, semicircular compound windows, artful chalkboard menu, café clutter tastefully arranged and illuminated. I order coffee and strike up a conversation with the patrons at the next table. Here, too, the mines are merely an object of cultural memory. The United Mine Workers had a local rival union in these parts, the Progressive Mine Workers of America. It went back to a Depression-era split when Illinois miners refused to go along with a reduction in wages and production negotiated by UMW president John L. Lewis. According to a friend who is a labor historian, the Progressive Miners had been influenced by Trotskyist organizers. Just as Trotsky opposed the Stalinist doctrine of “socialism in one country” and demanded the “permanent revolution,” the radical miners refused to retreat in their Depression-era demands and split from the compromising Lewis. They took a stand against implacable sea tides. If only the tides had obeyed their ideology. Remnants of the once radical union persisted until the end of the last century.

I recall that my friend Mike Hanagan spoke of his friendships with local miners and I wonder now if his Trotskyism was influenced by their radical tradition. Suddenly, I have an idea. Mike pursued higher academic studies in history. He would have written books and articles. I search for him as an historian and find a Michael P. Hanagan, author of books on labor history and proletarian solidarity in France. Sadly, I also find an obituary. He died last September from the complications of Parkinson’s. The obituary photo is of an older man with the bemused smile I remember from our all-night discussions in Urbana. I will write to his widow, a feminist historian. She will respond politely to my condolences, but not to my inquiry about the sources of Mike’s Trotskyism. I order his books: they are the best access to his lifelong engagement and intellectual aspirations. He taught as an adjunct at Vassar where his wife was a full professor. I search out old reviews of Mike’s teaching on Rate My Professor and am saddened to find that, though some students valued him as “friendly” and “sweet,” most evidently had little appreciation of his intense intellectual commitment. He believed in the book. For them this was “boring.” I feel like a castaway learning that a pilot who ferried him to this shore has gone under. Is there no returning to the culture of books and opposition—the world of the Russian intelligentsia?

Driving between the towns, I dream up schemes to publicize and present the documents of the Special Collections. I would stage a docudrama in the vestibule outside the Special Collections reading room, with pages projected overhead alternating with scenes of Coyoacán and world events, with a narrator to connect things and provide depth and continuity and actors at center stage playing Trotsky, Dewey, and the members of the commission. They would occupy the spotlight and speak at certain key points. Joyce’s letters from Trieste telling his brother in Dublin how to compile and submit the manuscript sections of Dubliners could alternate with images of the two men in the two cities and dramatic readings from the stories themselves. This would demonstrate that we only see our life and situation in depth from the vantage of another, which should be a pivotal learning experience for the student who has left home for college. It is no less the core insight of pluralism: we only know ourselves by knowing others. Isn’t it also a key insight of modernism? Only as Ulysses does Bloom attain immediacy. Only in comparison with the Alpine spruce and Russian birch do the Southern Illinois woods manifest their peculiar character. Only at a distance can we grasp the complex mechanisms that drive and manipulate our world. We are an infant outgrowth of the twentieth century, but the task of penetrating its codes and exploring the archeology of its thought is a challenge as daunting as cracking the Rosetta Stone. How can we make students aware of the depth and mystery of the world that confronts them?

Arriving back in Carbondale, I realize that all my schemes would require contacts and resources which I can’t even dream of mustering, but I continue to ruminate over drinks at the Underground. I have a panoramic vision. The Special Collections are analogous to the sacred relics as the heart of medieval churches. If the analogy holds, Carbondale is equivalent to a major medieval pilgrimage site. History is full of renaissances exploding with the excitement of rediscovery. This should receive due attention.

This is how I pass my days in Carbondale: first driving, then reading, then hiking or driving to nearby towns, then daydreaming in bars or cafés. I make casual friends. There is the psychology grad student I drive to work regularly. There are the bartenders and waitresses who appreciate that I am reserved and tip well; the librarians who are not overburdened with patrons in the summer and therefore always happy to see me. There is Sateesh, a restauranteur who parks his saffron food truck downtown and waits for customers. Sateesh is a fanatic of authenticity. I try to spread the word for him, but even he acknowledges that his fare costs more than the food at the local sit-down Indian restaurants. He is an idealist of the old ways. He remembers how his guru in India would burn him with a hot spoon for thoughtless mistakes. Sateesh complains that he has arrived here a millionaire and will leave a pauper.

I come across the rounded figure of the man with family roots in Hardin County. This time he doesn’t see me. I’m having dinner in the funky Italian Village. He is seated two booths in front of me and has just finished dinner. From the salad bar, I can see what he’s watching on his laptop. It’s a phony neo-Nazi Hitler biography concocted out of a BBC documentary called “Hitler: The Fatal Attraction.” I recognize the source because I’ve shown it to my students. The alt Right has cut and spliced it into a piece of transparent Nazi propaganda with the hilarious title “The Greatest Story Never Told.” The pudgy-faced guy is absorbed in this Nazi trash. I sneak out without being noticed and go for drinks.

Leaving the library on a Friday afternoon after three weeks in Carbondale, I see that a storm is blowing up. It occurs to me that it will generate Uber passengers. I can treat myself to Sateesh’s fine food in the evening with an easy conscience. One ride follows another. I am ready to quit when one more pops up for “Diana” from the Subway on West Main. I think that she is an easy way to finish. I park in front until a skinny middle-aged black man comes out with two plastic sacks full of surplus Subway staples and growls, “Let’s go.” When I ask about Diana, he snarls, “I said, let’s go!” He is cranky and creepy. Between his orders for me to follow his instructions, he carries on a monolog about the town, his neighborhood, his childhood, and his father, who he says chose the devil’s path. His mother chose the path to heaven. He goes on and on. I can’t ignore him, because I have to have his directions. We end up in a decrepit but orderly trailer park southeast of town. With relief, I see him off and drive back downtown, trying to piece together all the bits of his monologue I took in. Only then do I realize that this was not only a man with an urgent need to speak his mind. He was practically my first local patriot, proud of his neighborhood, proud of the high school he attended, and proud that his trailer park sits astride the Shawnee Trail from which he gathers up hated trash and refuse on his days off.

The next day is Saturday and I drive to the southern tip of the state, to Cairo. Actually, I make several trips down and get them confounded in my mind. I know that I’m mixing up a weekday trip with this Saturday one, because it involves a visit to the Cairo Public Library which is closed Saturdays. Where I grew up, we suffered from midwestern malaise. There were no mountains and no seas to give us a sense of direction. I never had a gut feeling to tell me this way is north, that way is sea, another way is mountains. Sometimes during my childhood, we would go on modest family outings south to Cave in Rock on the Ohio River, a site which as children we associated with river pirates. I remember the exhilarating feeling of natural orientation when after thirty minutes, a long, wooded ridge appeared on our left, parallel to the two-lane highway: mountains! Then the Ohio River oriented us toward all the seas of the world. When space offers no point of orientation, the sudden appearance of a landmark can distort our sense of time so that we lose track of our repeated appearances in a place. Every first tree of fall is equally proximate to all the falls of our lives. Charged presence emerges from a timeless void which is the realm of subliminal phenomena that are registered without being taken into account and integrated in memory. That void must be what Hegel had in mind when he wrote that the familiar, precisely because it is familiar, is not known by us. I find myself seeking refuge in mental abstraction.

In Cairo, it all comes together. I drive down out of the forested highlands of Union County into the swampy bottom lands of the lowest counties. Here you can feel that you’re in the Land Between the Rivers. You can feel them closing in on you. Driving through two railroad overpasses reminiscent of the gates of a walled city, I enter a sparsely populated place with high levees on three sides. I could pace off this littlest Egypt from one side to another in a coffee break. Washington Avenue has a few restored mansions but mostly it’s crumbling houses which were once the dwellings of the privileged. In the town center stand buildings intended for the metropolis that Cairo never became. There is the Old Customs House, in which I can imagine Melville’s Bartleby repeating his dictum, “I would prefer not to.” There is the WPA-era Court House. Both are scaled to the larger city Cairo once was and the even larger one projected as the port of entry for ocean and river traffic. Finally, there is the steep-gabled Cairo Public Library, one of the finest buildings of its kind. The commercial district looks like it’s gone through a carpet bombing: vacant lots and abandoned stores everywhere. Something about the decaying old churches suggests that the worm gnawed its way into the city’s heart early on. The spires have a squat and stunted shape, as if their gestures toward heaven had always been duplicitous.

When the library is open, I ask for material relevant to the history of the city. The librarian replies in the driest tone that there is practically nothing, only the old newspapers available on microfiche. She brings some antiquated volumes that have short biographies of early settlers and pillars of nineteenth-century Cairo. There is a picture book compiled twenty years ago but with photos from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. The volumes contain not a single intentionally depicted African American, though the city had a large black population. One photo bears the title “The Many Faces of Cairo.” Not one of those faces is black. The struggle to integrate the city lasted into my high school and college years, but I have little recollection of reading or thinking about it. Civil Rights was a struggle carried on in the South, not here, so we felt. There were stirring songs and slogans celebrating it. After I transferred for my last semester to the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana in 1969, a summons went out to demonstrate support for the hard-pressed black people of Cairo. The politically active students drove four hours south. In a church annex, we received reports of sniper attacks on black neighborhoods. We marched down the street carrying placards and banners. Then we got back in our cars, drove home, and forgot about Cairo. The world was so much broader and more exciting in 1969.

Almost everywhere I stop in Southern Illinois, I encounter a tone that says, “At last you’re here! We’ve been waiting forever for your arrival!” In Cairo, the tone of the white librarian and the white waitress at Shemwell’s Barbecue is polite but sullen, as if to say, “We know exactly what you’re thinking about us; but what makes you think you’re any better?” That is a question that can’t be dismissed. When I was growing up, Cairo was an unseen sore spot, not to be touched yet hard to ignore. Like the “good Germans,” we chose not to know. Now I just want out of here. As I drive north through the railroad underpasses to leave town, I recall seeing a photo in an article on the racism that killed this city. The photo shows a massive lynch mob, a sea of savage white faces, men and women. Did the body of the black victim, a young man named Will James, dangle from the gateway I’m driving under now, before it was riddled with bullets, dragged, burned, decapitated, and its head impaled in a local park? When I was growing up, the bootleggers’ and miners’ violence of Williamson County exercised a folkloric attraction. We all knew about “Bloody Williamson.” There were “the Birgers and the Sheltons,” rival bootlegging gangs. Their thug wars featured gun battles, a cool aerial bombardment of a rival gang’s headquarters, and the execution of a crime boss who lacked clout with the law. The Cairo lynchings and racial conflict found no place in our collective memory. We managed to ignore it.

I drive north through ironically named Future City. Then, Mound City, county seat of Pulaski County and two tenths of nothing. Then more levees. They could call this Little Holland. Then inland into the Shawnee Forest and south to Metropolis, a county seat with over six thousand residents. It’s an old Ohio River port which has sold its soul for a pittance. The main downtown street leads through a festive gateway to riverboat gambling and is now in something like Halloween mode for the local superhero festival. Just because Metropolis happens to have the same name as Superman’s fictional city, it’s claimed him and erected a big campy statue to capitalize on the association. Despite a gentle rain, the streets are haunted by overgrown children and childish adults in superhero costumes that often enough clash with their overweight condition. Something more personal is bothering me in this.

I eat at a clean but nearly empty Italian restaurant and chat with the young waitress. I ask her, “Is all this flummery really necessary?” She assures me almost with civic pride that otherwise Metropolis has virtually nothing. Some residual jobs on the river, a Honeywell plant soon to close, riverboat gambling, superheroes, a Civil War reenactors’ camp: “that’s about it.” When I ask about the racial composition of Metropolis, her formulation surprises me: “I don’t know, but there are more of us than them.” Us…them. Yet there seems to be no malice in her tone. The manager of my apartment complex in Carbondale is a young African American from Metropolis. He claims that his hometown is a world apart from Cairo. He says that it’s the difference between Cairo’s Mississippian culture and the Ohio culture of Metropolis where the black population migrated up from Kentucky to work on the river. Metropolis de-segregated before the Civil Rights Act. In Cairo, the African American population goes back to slaves who fled north during the Civil War and sought protection like the immigrants who are now flooding across the Rio Grande. Every place has its problems, but according to my apartment manager there were far fewer in Metropolis than in Cairo.

What is unbearable to me is the soggy cosplay festival. The sight of overgrown children or childlike adults in damp superhero costumes accompanied by their parents and with their rolls of fat bulging out of their gaudy outfits not only depresses me. My depression carries an undercurrent of anxiety. I get in my car and drive north on I-24 and then onto I-57. I’m going home. I won’t even detour to my apartment. I drive through a torrential rain after Mt. Vernon. At Salem, I exit and visit my mother’s grave and then drive on east to the farmhouse of my foster sister and her family, Phyllis and Rick and their oldest son Alan. Here, too, what I find is depressing. There are signs of disintegration. Though Rick has always moonlighted as a factory worker, he always saw himself as a farmer. This identity and existence with all its attendant struggles probably sustained the cohesion of his large family. But now, after devoting his life and utterly sacrificing his health to farming, he and Alan are talking about giving up and reducing their production to hay. Otherwise, they’ll need new planting equipment which even used costs $ 30,000. The epic rains this spring have so far kept them from planting enough to collect crop insurance. When the crop is sold in advance, the losses can be catastrophic.

It’s raining again as I resume my drive north. It makes me think of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” It makes me think of the great Chilean folksinger Violeta Parra and her anthem for the Andean Indios, “El Guillatun.” “La lluvia que caye y vuelve a caer…” The rain that keeps coming down like blows hurled at the weak. At least Parra’s mountain Indian peasants have their sacred myth to address their fate. What do the hard pressed of Little Egypt have? I think about my conversations with the retired SIU chancellor. To him, regionalism amounts to rural resentment. He writes southern Illinois with a lower-case “s.” I would like to think that he has it wrong. Does every social entity and region have to relate vertically to the same centers of information and control? Shouldn’t there be a place for a hierarchy of collective identities? Isn’t the local pride of the Bavarian, the Rhinelander, the Provençal a form of social capital? The downtrodden have been known to turn their condition into a defiant collective identity. They can only do this if they admit to themselves and to the world who and what they are. What are the Blues but the dignity of the dispossessed? But I also know the passivity of rural Illinois poverty. I know the illusion of freedom, the self-esteem manipulated by consumerism, facile populism, and the tacit consolation for the majority of simply being white. Perhaps we do the rural poor a disservice by insisting that they consider themselves “as good as everyone else.” Advisers should be brought in from El Salvador to teach our rural poor how to be poor. I’m weirdly unsettled.

Agitated, utopian visions come to me in the transitory ecstasies of driving: I imagine SIU organizing story-telling contests in the cafés and meeting places of the region; the best stories by acclaim are then published in a university venue for new writing. The creative professional writers then do what artists, musicians, and poets have done since Romanticism. They draw on folk material in creating their sophisticated work. They stop writing for each other and speak with and for the people. They serve as midwife to its culture. This approach led to some of the greatest literature of the past. It has become so alien to the culture of academic writing that the popular source might begin to seem like a new idea.

As I get closer to home, my ecstasy dissolves and my anxiety increases. I park, hurry in, and find my wife upstairs in bed. She has injured her back and has a nosebleed. When she gets out of bed, I see how emaciated she is and am shocked. She and my son had been alarmed by my cancer. They have convinced themselves cancer is avoidable and not properly treated by conventional medicine. They have been adhering to a low-protein diet. I won’t go into the tension and conflict that follow my return; but I soon realize that from now on I should make this my base with only briefer excursions.

Now I swim every day at the YMCA and read long books, among them the companion novels of Vasily Grossman: Stalingrad, nearly 1,000 pages, and Life and Fate, pushing 900. Grossman is imperfect and uneven; but this inconsistency is a tormented debate with his times. He considers Chekhov the intellectual model for a humane, pluralistic, and free society. As a novel of ideas, the Stalingrad cycle has implications that go beyond the problems of Soviet society. Some observations in this jerrybuilt novel fit into my mental monolog like answers to questions I wasn’t quite aware yet of having asked. A Russian prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp is influenced by Tolstoy. Ikonnikov has come to the realization that even in nature the larger trees struggle for domination over the smaller vegetation. In this world of domination, every organized attempt to impose an idea of the Good upon the world, whether by Christianity or by Communism, has resulted in evil and repression. Ikonnikov recognizes only “The private kindness of one individual toward another . . . Something we could call senseless kindness. A kindness outside any system of social or religious good” (II, 408).

I read travel literature, including the popular subgenre in which exotic country people are paraded out to horrify and entertain the sophisticated, to wit J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Tony Horwitz’s Spying on the South. These authors know what sells: exotic rural folk, ignorant and proud. Grandma sets Grandpa on fire and threatens outsiders with a shotgun. Vance writes well and has a feel for mixing registers. He has his place in the national conversation. But there is no ignoring the context. Hicks and hillbillies are trading well in the marketplace of ideas these days. Lots of factors are driving their share price up. The trend encompasses the election of Donald Trump and the Yellow Vests movement I witnessed in France. It includes Duck Dynasty, Ozark, guns, ammo, and fashionable camo. No con man could ever sell the forgotten to themselves like the perennially bankrupt realtor from Manhattan.

For the rest of the summer, Southern Illinois is an intermezzo and Bloomington a serialized tragedy. I make it down occasionally. Sometimes I stay overnight for several days at a time. Two of my short excursions are near the end of July. I have the good fortune to meet a reporter from the Carbondale newspaper who has covered the housing difficulties in Cairo and the East St. Louis area. I meet with an organizer of the Democratic Socialist chapter and learn about oppositional stirrings in Carbondale. I drive west to Grand Tower on the Mississippi and the next morning east on the route 13 corridor. Either direction changes the quality of the towns and country dramatically.

Between Murphysboro and Marion, the right of way is depressingly overdeveloped. After that, you enter different country: poor but at peace with itself. I could claim it as the country of my childhood, but this wouldn’t be quite accurate. Back then, even rural highways were defaced by billboards and advertising that blotted out the scenery. Much of that has been eliminated, presumably by the internet. The rural landscape is now largely pristine. There is less urban sprawl. People can’t afford it. Small places rise out of green countryside like compact European villages. Harrisburg must be poor, since it used to live from mining; but it wears its faded vestments with dignity. Some of its older architecture is inspired and original. The hilltop campus of Southeastern Illinois College which stands isolated amid broad, fertile plains has the air of a Benedictine monastery. Often, I come across family-owned cafés where local people eat, chat, drink coffee, and converse with the inquisitive traveler as if he were their next-door neighbor.

I notice that the church message boards don’t favor the cloying cuteness they advertise further north. They don’t coax. They declaim their stark messages, whether it’s the pathetic “Jesus: His Love Lasts Forever,” the exultant “Victory in Jesus,” or the exuberant “There Is Joy in Serving Jesus.” There is also the dark and cryptic: “Baptism does not downplay the blood; it gives us access to it.” There is the exhortatory, “The Master is here. He is calling out to you,” and the laconic “Visitors Welcome, Members Required.” Notwithstanding the austere theology, public encounters are pleasant and civil. It’s hard for me to imagine these parts inhabited by Vance’s profligate hillbillies or Horwitz’s Mudfest revelers. If you looked for them hard enough, I am sure that you could find them here. If you look in our cities, you can find equally vulgar and colorful specimens; but it might be harder to sell them to the public as quintessential New Yorkers. Oh yes, we all know that the con man from Manhattan is a creature conjured forth from the depths of the national soul by Appalachian and Rust Belt losers! I theorize that in the more rural areas, country people don’t need to defiantly advertise their identity. Their identity is like their religion: take it or leave it but don’t make a big production out of it.

I visit tiny Golconda, where the ancient cemetery is surrounded by a high wall to resist the floods, and I stop in even tinier Elisabethtown, the Hardin County seat. In Shawneetown, Gallatin County, I tour the remnants of the once-thriving river town with its Roman-columned bank building worthy of some provincial seat of empire. Most of the rest has been washed out by river floods. The town was moved west onto higher ground. My guides are Christy and Wayne who moved here from California and embraced the cause of historical preservation. They introduce me to some mostly older collaborators. Again, I have the feeling that they have all been waiting patiently for my arrival. We understand each other instinctively. Appreciation, recovery, and preservation are a phase of generational development. I am pleased to meet everyone and promise to come back.

This I do only a week later. I want to be present for two events: a demonstration of water pollution-controlling equipment by an innovative company located in the town of Carmi where I grew up, and the brilliant sky in the deepest Egyptian darkness of Gallatin and Hardin Counties on a night predicted to be moonless and clear. First, I visit my hometown Carmi. I want to stop in and chat with the town manager Sandra Irving; but to my surprise, she has retired since my last visit. I wanted to share my thoughts about the lack of entertaining attractions for young people. When I was growing up here, there were two movie theaters. I saw almost every film they showed. Sometimes I sat through more than one showing. On weekend nights, there was a teenagers’ club with soft drinks and dance music. One of the three downtown coffee houses had a carved wooden counter for baked goods and booths that were perfect for the gossip and flirtation of our after-school cliques. Now, there is nothing for the young. Sandra had told me that an empty storefront could be made available on demand. I have nothing much to offer, but I still wanted to share my thoughts with her.

Now that my rejoinder for Sandra has no takers, my convictions feel more urgent. I would like to say that the local people, young and old, clearly crave companionship and shared experiences. The Carmi Coffee Shop and Dairy Queen are full of groups that meet and chat. As for shared entertainment, the culture of cinema has gone the way of the quilting bee and square dance. If cinematic culture is to be revived, it will have to be treated as a knowledge to be acquired through study and effort, like that of theater or music. The investment is what validates the experience for the learner. I wanted to suggest to Sandra that in cooperation with SIU, Carmi and other towns could offer Skype-enabled courses on cinema and the media. Local libraries could serve as hospitable venues if the enrollments were small. Everywhere I stop in Southern Illinois, the local libraries are havens of culture and learning, tended by informed and diligent custodians. I imagine media courses that offer credit but also admit guests. As I drive out of town, my vision gets ever more expansive. The courses would not only revive the culture of cinema, perhaps even creating enough demand to transfer the events to specially furnished cinema cafés in artfully restored downtown buildings; distance learning courses could offer academic benefits as well as entertainment. This might give locals, young and old, a toehold in higher education and an incentive to continue traditional or nontraditional study in Carbondale. Once again, SIU would serve as the cultural beacon of the region. The key insight would be that learning can be entertaining.

I drive out into the fertile river bottom lands to search for Indian mounds that I recently read existed in White County. Near Maunie, I stop and ask locals twice. Since they have never heard of any such thing, I conclude that my sources must be obsolete. When I arrive in Grayville to spend the night and meet with old friends, classmates of my brother, I learn that the Indian remains really were there. The locals—including me when I was growing up—had so little interest in them that even the nearest farmers hadn’t heard of them. The Grayville librarian and my brother’s classmates tell the same story: in the 1950s and 60s, one especially assiduous grave robber cleaned out many of the sites, but after an excavation collapsed and injured him, measures were taken to safeguard them—out of concern for the safety of the grave robbers. After dinner in a Mexican restaurant next to my hotel, we tour tiny Grayville, a town of fewer than 2,000 that punches above its weight in terms of bars and well-preserved edifices. The influence of the founding Gray family is everywhere. A plaque on the sheriff’s office heralds the site of James Gray’s stable and slave quarters. That’s a bit of history worth remembering.

The conversation with these old friends, who were really friends of my brother, is balsam for my soul. Their voices and intonations suggest that all the disparate parts of my life could still be stitched into a whole. Dialect maps of Southern Illinois indicate that its botanical diversity has a linguistic counterpart in the variety of its dialects. In the southwest of the state we share a lot with the Ozarks and Missouri; in the center with the deep South. Heading northward, speech blends into inland northern, while to the east there are traces of Appalachia. Even without phonetic research my ear registers it. This couple has never moved away. Their speech has the reassuring pitch and accent of my childhood. He is the undeceived friend of my older brother. His tone and mentality are dry, ironic, and mentally distanced from the foolishness of his fellow citizens. It’s as if he had stayed here as an anthropologist, a Claude Levy-Strauss of his home county. He doesn’t need to accentuate the stupidity of taking precautions to protect grave robbers while ignoring their desecrations. His dry tone says it all. No pathos needed.

What I learn now about my brother is devastating. Toward the end, he was convinced that his insides were being eaten away by cancer. He was passing blood, tormented by guilt and failure, and praying for some decent way to end it all. That was his condition in his last months and days, after I washed my hands of him. It shocks me to imagine how he was tormented by loneliness. Pain and despair are one thing, loneliness another. We believe in being effective, and so we wash our hands of anyone who is beyond hope. But even the condemned don’t have to face death alone. God, how I failed my poor brother! All this time, I’ve told myself that I did all I could. Why did I let him approach death alone?

The next morning, I drive a short distance to the Indiana side of the Wabash River which constitutes the state line. A gathering of men and one woman in company-furnished life vests and wide-brimmed hats is preparing to navigate the wide river in four flat-bottomed aluminum boats manufactured by the Carmi firm Elastec. It specializes in oil removal equipment. I put on my Panama hat and life vest and join one of the teams. It’s a mild morning, and it feels good to be on the water. In the course of the day, we shift tasks: long lines of booms are laid out to channel the current, protect the shoreline, and collect the hypothetical spilled oil. It’s agreeable to watch these skilled participants tying knots, unloading and reloading booms, playing out lines, and estimating the direction and force of currents. After all the tasks have been taught and practiced, masses of popcorn will be released to simulate an oil spill. The choice of popcorn will make it easy to evaluate the effectiveness of the oil removal.

Several aspects of this enterprise fascinate me. The first is that, according to the origination story, the company’s design was the inspiration of oil workers. Assigned the frustrating task of cleaning up an oil-covered pond, an exasperated worker tossed a drum into the mess. When he observed that the spinning cylinder carried oil with it up out of the mire, it occurred to him that if the drum could be made to rotate, attached brushes could then skim off the oil. This was the beginning of a technology that proved highly efficient, won recognition and support, and found a lucrative international market. A second point of fascination for me is that the skimming equipment and boom vane that guides the barriers out into the river and back are powered by the river itself. Artificial power has polluted nature. The power of nature is harnessed to clean it up. Only the pumps and outboard motors depend on fossil fuel. Otherwise the technology is reducible to the principle of the ancient watermill.

Above all, I am fascinated by the dynamic ingenuity of the enterprise. Technologies and techniques are developed and adapted to fit evolving needs. I once asked the CEO Jeff Bohleber whether his technology could be adapted for ocean cleanup. Of course, he replied, you would only need someone to cover the cost. It occurred to me that Elastec should be a poster child for the Green New Deal. There is a lot of mess to be cleaned up in the world. You would only need someone to foot the bill. I enjoy the fact that the peaceful operations of the teams have a slightly military air of comradeship and teamwork. This kind of work could exemplify my favorite philosopher William James’s call for a “Moral Equivalent of War.” I imagine a world war against pollution and environmental destruction. It would recall the massive exertions of the Depression and World War II, parallel to the transforming mobilizations all across the globe from Soviet Russia to WPA America or China in recent decades. Whether their objectives were good or evil, no one can deny their effectiveness. That’s the question those documents in the Special Collections really pose: Can the world unite to combat the destruction that individuals in selfish competition have caused? No one here is likely to see potential in my vision. The participants here identify with the fossil fuel industry. Less drilling means less clean up. They feel humiliated that “everyone blames oil.”

After our team sets a line of booms to protect the shore from hypothetical oil, we have some spare time on the water. For amusement, the team leader slows the outboard motor to the medium speed which can be counted on to make the Asian carp skyrocket out of the water. Suddenly, this tranquil midwestern river boils with large bloated fish leaping two or three feet out of the water. Some slam into the sides of the aluminum flatboat. A few arc and tumble on board, flailing their way across the stacked booms for the full width of the boat and back into the water. My companions think it’s funny. To me the speed and trajectory of these alien fish are unnatural and horrifying. They were evidently introduced to cleanse commercial fish farms in the southeastern states. That was a move as stupid as the introduction of rabbits into Australia. If the US government had been behind it, the response would be different. The fact that profit was the motive—not government regulation—seems to screen these invasive immigrants from anger and indignation.

In mid-afternoon, I thank my hosts and drive south to Shawneetown. I want to check into my motel, find some dinner, and take a nap before what promises to be a late-night adventure. At 8 pm, Christy will introduce me to a young farmer named Joe who has volunteered to help me find the darkest places for observing the night sky. The motel is old-fashioned but adequate. The work-ravaged couple that manages it advises me that dining options are either gas station pizza or a family restaurant six miles away. I opt for the latter and easily find my way to the converted gas station restaurant located at the junction and called the Junction. It’s a good choice. The food is simple but attentively made. There are a few other patrons. One young guy stops in, orders coffee to go, and while he waits, remarks to the seated customers that he hauls rock dust to a mine in Equality seven days a week. I comment that, with rock dust coating the mine walls, miners now get white lung instead of black lung; but they hasten to inform me that the main thing is preventing mine explosions that burn up all the oxygen. This leads to my conversation with another customer. After high school, he worked for seven years on the river barges. There was no romance, only a constant rotation of shifts on and off. Only some of the larger ports such as St. Louis or Minneapolis offer opportunities to leave the barge and have some fun. After this barge work, he mined for a time, and now he’s taken his savings and settled into modest farming. I detect no undertone of whining or resentment.

When the locals talk about living or farming in the area, there is a certain mystique associated with what they call “the bottoms.” It sounds at first as if they were referring to some inaccessible region of swamps, but the bottoms are really just the flat lands of the Ohio flood plain, fertile but subject to periodic flooding. The bottoms contrast with the river and the wooded outcroppings of the Shawnee Hills. An older man, an eccentric character with a long white beard and ten-gallon hat, remarks that what one young waitress needs is either three weeks in the Bahamas or three hours with him in “the bottoms.” Sexual innuendo is accepted senior-citizen banter here. The waitress comments dryly that that’s why she gave up waitressing in bars; but she doesn’t reproach the old guy. In paying, I mention the prevalence of tall patrons and joke that the café seems to specialize in seven-foot customers. The waitress is amused and assures me that they are all regulars.

Back at the Shawnee Chief motel, I try to get some shut eye, but my sleeping habits are too fixed. For once, I have no good reading material. I lie in bed and make notes of things I’ve read or heard and want to remember. The Special Collections documents with the Joyce letters and the correspondence of Piscator with Brecht come to mind. Like me, they were stranded in unfamiliar places, Joyce as an expat in Trieste, Piscator an anti-Fascist refugee in Paris. In either case, you could see how they treated their letters as life rafts. Joyce’s are perfectly framed and typed, like the print pages he hoped to see in the Dubliners tales he was compiling. Piscator and the exiles from Nazi Germany evidently lugged their German typewriters into exile. You can see how worn their ink ribbons became. Perhaps they couldn’t get the right ones for their German machines abroad. My own notes are barely legible to me.

A little before 8 pm, I notice a pickup truck with welding equipment in the back. Christy arrives and introduces me to Joe Patrick. He is stocky, pleasant, well-spoken, and without the country crapola that rural people affect in some parts. No camo. No creationist or NRA decals on his truck. This accords with the impression I have, or at least prefer to have, of people here.

He places himself at my disposal and asks what I would like to do in the remaining time before it gets darkest. I suggest that we drive around the countryside of Gallatin and Hardin Counties. I want to see how people live in “the bottoms.” So, we slowly cruise country roads as the darkness intensifies. As I’ve noticed before, the poverty here is not squalid. The smallest houses and trailers are well kept and set off by well-tended lawns free of trash and junk. Evidently, they haven’t heard of Vance or received their hillbilly training yet. A road running between hedge rows and fields is muddy. We look to the left. A slow-moving barge with its lights on is laboring steadily upstream on the Ohio. He points out cisterns. The ground here is unobtrusively managed as if this were Holland. I hadn’t noticed the river was so close. There is nothing quite like the quiet steady motion of river traffic. Joe tells me about his work. In addition to his modest farming, he is an underwater welder. I had heard on the Wabash that when oil pipelines break below water, underwater welders are brought in to fix them. He explains how this is done. It’s the same as other welding except that it requires far greater heat. I want to say that it sounds exciting, but he cautions that nothing could be drearier than when a river barge snags a log or rock in winter and requires fumbling operations in the cold and dark currents. Telling me about his life and work he realizes that they are more interesting, more characteristic, than he’d been aware.

I remark that nearly everyone is drawn away from the countryside and into the cities. Why not him? He replies that he was too. After high school, he worked in Lafayette, Indiana, and then trained and worked as a welder in Paducah, Kentucky, for seven years. After a divorce, he moved back and with his brother bought out the 140-acre family farm from the other heirs. We talk about improvisations and satisfactions of rural living. We compare notes on the toils and pleasures of heating with a wood stove which I know from my mother’s village house. I can sense that Joe expects to hear my opinion about the existence I’ve come here to encounter, so I theorize that most people make the mistake of thinking that if they move to a bigger place, their lives will become more important, more meaningful. Some people really need to move. Some have to. Others are chasing an illusion. If they can’t chase it by moving, they chase it with entertainment; and if that doesn’t satisfy them, they chase their illusion with drugs. Everywhere, people are drawn like moths to the flame by the illusion that changing places, changing their external circumstances, will change what they are in some meaningful way. This may or may not turn out. It is least likely to work when we expect the change to come from without. We want to change our circumstances or improve our bodies. We rarely think about changing ourselves from within. If we all changed ourselves from within, would the world be transformed?

What if we asked about our real needs and questioned every acquisition as if we were making out our last will and testament every hour? The economy would go through the equivalent of a cold-turkey drug withdrawal; but isn’t it better to face reality without drugs, without the artificial stimulus of the next big thing? I’m convinced that questions like this are what motivate my son’s asceticism; and I’m sorry now that I haven’t done more to support him in searching for his path. He is right to reject not only drugs but everything unnecessary or potentially harmful in life. What is life then? He’ll find out.

We have come to a stretch that’s extremely dark. I ask Joe to stop and turn off his lights. We get out and look up at the stars. Their brilliance is stunning. I had planned to measure the darkness with an app in units called “bortles.” I had expected to be reminded of van Gogh or to recite verses of the great German poets of the starry heavens. None of this is relevant. What impresses is that the bright heavens don’t need us at all. We can destroy terrestrial nature, but we can’t touch them. Even the signs of the zodiac which I can trace around their circle are empty constructs. It’s better to surrender to the stars’ infinite indifference to all our terrestrial doings. We resume our tour, but no further observation matches the power of the first one. We talk. Joe remarks that intelligent conversation and observing the stars are not common experiences for him. I realize that he reminds me of my deceased articulate brother. My water bottle is empty. I get hoarse and can barely talk. We decide to call it a night.

It’s late for me when we say goodbye and I return to my motel room. I’m used to going to bed early and getting up early. When I go to bed too late, it’s as if I had missed my train connection. I lie awake and think about everything: the starry sky that speaks for itself, the unappreciated treasure of rural darkness, Joe’s intelligence, the determination of the training teams on the Wabash, and the grotesque airborne riot of the Asian carp. I think about Chekhov and Tolstoy whose vision of life was capacious enough to recognize the meaningful dimensions of the ordeals and aspirations of my Little Egypt. I remember the documents of Counts, Dewey, Trotsky, Piscator, and Joyce. Dubliners comes to mind. What a pleasure to hold in my hands the letters from Trieste in which the author instructs his brother how to compile and submit the narrative components! I remember reading as a freshman two stories in particular: “Araby,” a tale of youthful love and disappointment, and “The Dead,” that great pellucid vision of renunciation. Why is its famous mystical conclusion so unforgettable? It’s the snow which is said to be “faintly falling” on the living and the dead. The snow adorns the marginal Irish earth, making it whole and beautiful. In Joyce’s unforgettable phrase, the snow is descending “through the universe.” The finite world of our earthly existence is commingled with the infinite world of the stars.

August 11, 2019

2. Egypt from the Bottom Up

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

As a scholar, I’ve studied the phenomenon of “mystical illumination” and the concepts of microcosm and macrocosm. There is also a mysticism of ordinary experience, an illumination that recognizes the coherence of the humbled self with the commonplace world. Through empathy, we recognize that we are no better than and hardly different from the common sort from which we spend a lifetime striving to distinguish ourselves. Paradoxically, this unifying insight can set us apart and offer a more revealing perspective, a favorable vantage by the grace of the abjured self. This is one reason for my interest in my origins. Growing up, I was never interested in Southern Illinois or its history: it struck me as banal and meaningless. Like so many of us, I was too special for where I came from. Now I have the feeling that Midwestern banality is the stuff of which I have been indelibly crafted, and that it is a complex material indeed. Understanding it through empathy is the key to understanding myself and my world.

As the reader may have gathered, my roots in Little Egypt follow a conventional Midwestern pattern and require only a brief summary. In the small Southern Illinois town where I grew up, I was liberated by books: first by the stories of exotic adventure that I found in the local library and then by the works of philosophy and literature that found their way into our household or were purchased at a newsstand in Evansville, Indiana. I disdained high school, earned mediocre grades, and attended Southern Illinois University because it was nearby and where one went. As I’ve mentioned, SIU was my gateway to the world. I took pride in getting perfect grades. I lived independently by working half-time and obtained a scholarship to study for a year at the University of Hamburg where I was swept up in the intellectual excitement of the 1960s. After returning in 1968, I transferred to the University of Illinois and, except for a year in West Berlin in 1972-73, remained at U. of I for my M.A. and Ph.D. degrees.

My view of the Sixties is too complicated and conflicted to fit into a brief summary, except to say that for me it was an interval when intellectual life meant something, a time of awakening and comradeship based on shared aspirations, values, and ideas. If the autodidactic beginnings of my education set me apart, my intellectual evolution after the Sixties completed the disassociation. During the decade and a half between completing my Ph.D. and obtaining tenure at Illinois State University, I spent roughly one third of my years leading at my own expense the life of the mind, reading, traveling, researching, and writing as an independent scholar. Inspired by the French Annales school of historiography and by Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie and Carlo Ginzburg, I researched the literature of early modern German mysticism and dissent in pursuit of its social-historical underpinnings. I wrote monographs and edited and translated the writings of Paracelsus, Valentin Weigel, and Jacob Boehme. My research convinced me that they were driven by theological passions. I fine-tuned my understanding by documenting that the dissenters and mystics were motivated by tension between the laity and clerical-academic authority.

My anticipation of a social reality at the root of mysticism was thus confirmed but in a way that cast a critical light on my career path. As an autodidact and academic, I recognized that the fault line between the independent thinker and the professional intellectual bifurcated my mental life. I had always been drawn to the solitary life of the mind, rebelling against schools and professors; but I also strove for a position and recognition in the academy. I came to understand that this fault line runs through higher education, society itself, and much of history. A universal divide separates the unauthorized layperson from the oppressive authority figure. At least since the Middle Ages, social climbing has informed the DNA of academics, just as disdain for “scribes and Pharisees” has always been ingrained in our culture. This conflict is not one in which we can blithely take sides. There have always been and will be arrogant scholastics whose authority is oppressive, as well as justly revered voices of learned wisdom; coarse anti-elitist know-nothings, as well as untutored geniuses. The authoritarian and antiauthoritarian both have a capacity to err. Nonetheless, I am convinced that learning is distorted, and knowledge skewed, by the social climbing which typically accompanies them. Education as self-improvement entails rising above the common lot. Learning is corrupted by social-institutional aspirations. An age-old, unstudied conflict is currently exacerbating the gap between the opposing sides in our fraught political situation.

This account of my career and intellectual development is sketchy and unimpressive. It might sound like a confession of crippling self-doubt, aimless wandering, and thwarted achievement, perhaps over illuminated by self-importance. My career path only brought me from one second-tier state university to another, both ironically located on a US route 51 which bisects our state from north to south. But self-doubt, wandering, modest achievement, and incessant reflection encouraged self-knowledge. Self-knowledge isn’t contingent upon contentment or acclaim. Approaching seventy-three, I am far from contented. I don’t look back with satisfaction on a life of singular achievement. I am not surrounded by affectionate contemporaries or admiring youth. What I cherish is—besides my family and a few good friends—my sense that a lifetime of study continues to disclose figures of knowledge, what the mystics I’ve studied called the “signatures of things”: intuitively known truths concealed in plain sight.

This is why I am turning my attention to the region where I grew up. In the third year of the Trump presidency, we are surrounded on all sides by anger, self-righteousness, and virtue signaling. For me, Little Egypt is a dark mirror and neglected link between microcosm and macrocosm. Like any place, it is best described from its foundations up. Three great rivers define it on three sides and characterize it culturally and economically: the Wabash, an Ohio tributary that bore French trappers and explorers infiltrating the Midwest; the Ohio, an artery of westward expansion that transported Southerners, Easterners, and New Englanders into the Illinois Territory; and the Mississippi, which allowed trade and population exchange with the Southern states. The lowest Southern Illinois counties, Alexander with its county seat in Cairo, Pulaski (Mound City), and Massac (Metropolis) are wedged into the confluence. Observers have remarked on the calm beauty of the Ohio and expressed dismay at the vastness and violence of the Mississippi. My Carbondale apartment manager claims that his hometown of Metropolis had a more positive history of race relations than Cairo, the Ohio culture of the former contrasting with the Mississippi culture of the latter. The tip of Egypt already encapsulates the duality of our region.

Over this lowest tier are stacked the wooded highlands of Union (Jonesboro), Johnson (Vienna), Pope (Golconda), and Hardin (Elisabethtown) Counties. They are among the poorest, most rural counties in the state. Next are Jackson (Murphysboro), Williamson (Marion), Saline (Harrisburg), and Gallatin (Shawneetown) Counties. This third tier encompasses the route 13 corridor which runs east and west, with a flood plain margin on either side, from Murphysboro and Carbondale (Jackson County), Herrin and Marion (Williamson), by extension to Harrisburg (Saline): the most populous and prosperous belt of Lower Egypt. It’s a region of old mining towns which once secured the wealth of Southern Illinois. The ground has been literally pulled from under these places, yet they hang on tenaciously. Despite realistically gloomy prognoses, I’m inclined to consider their prima facie condition more stable and dignified than what one reads about the Appalachian mining regions. Next up are Randolph (Chester), Perry (Pinckneyville), Franklin (Benton), Hamilton (McLeansboro), and White County (Carmi). Beyond these counties which I think of as deeper Egypt, an upward spread ranges from the populous semi-metropolitan counties of St. Clair and Madison, which are part of the St. Louis Metro East area, through Marion County (Salem) where my mother’s family lived, across the state to the backwaters of Wabash or Lawrence Counties on the Wabash River which branches north from the Ohio. You can take your pick in setting the northern limits of Southern Illinois. Some prefer I-70, some I-64, some even say the route 13 corridor. It’s a matter of degree. Egypt is a human condition. Rural abandonment and racial and social tension are pervasive aspects of the state, nation, and world. Egypt is a macrocosm of its individuals, a microcosm of the world, and a dark mirror of my life. Southern Illinois history bored me as a child or teenager. It is now full of parables relevant to my existence and the life of the world. Southern Illinois embodies a universal paradox: a marginal region which has repeatedly aspired to be or imagined itself as central, a status it perhaps attained around a millennium ago in the enigma of prehistoric Cahokia. The monocultural key to ascent harbored the seeds of decline. The lesson of history is the folly of a too narrow self-characterization, of ethno- and egocentrism and their attendant hubris. Egypt is the darkness that lies both in the past and within us which is thrilling to contemplate.

Premodern minds knew a “Book of the World.” In the symbolic book of my region, the cryptic preface of vanished Cahokians is followed by repetitive chapters encompassing the Native American powers of the Illinois and Iroquois Confederations that vied for hegemony in territories that became the state. They were followed by the French and British who crowded them out, seizing what could be claimed in an unbounded wilderness. Soon, the Americans dominated both. Any fool could see that waterways were essential to control and exploitation. Explorers and speculators competed to dominate the rivers, erecting forts and settlements along their banks. The flamboyant monetary theorist, John Law of the “Mississippi Bubble,” urged French and German settlers to move into Louisiana to the south. The fur trade drew French trappers and explorers down from Canada. Native American, French, British, and American forces vied for control of Illinois during the Seven Years War between Prussia, Austria and their respective allies (known as the French and Indian War in North America), the Revolutionary War, various “Indian wars,” and the War of 1812. The Book of Little Egypt has its recurrent motifs. Participants in our regional dramas imagined they were front and center on the world stage; but our obscure struggles were peripheral to larger contests in remote theaters of empire. Conversely, precisely in experiencing ourselves as a world unto itself, we shed light on the vanity of all fame and conquest.

Consider, for example, the case of George Rogers Clark, a name I vaguely recall from my grade school curriculum. A hero of the wilderness front in the Revolutionary War, he challenged British control by carrying out spectacular marches back and forth across Southern Illinois, bloodlessly capturing British outposts and staking an American claim to what would become the Midwest. Clark got short-changed for his spectacular military initiatives. Historians disparaged his impact on history. In school, I am sure that he bored us. Why this ingratitude? He won his campaigns through stealth, endurance, and good intelligence; but, alas, his battles left almost no one dead. In contrast, Andrew Jackson’s pointless victory at New Orleans (fought, due to delayed communication, after the War of 1812 had already ended) would be commemorated in legend and a Johnny Horton song which fancied up the senseless slaughter with Dixieland frills. (“We fired our guns and the British kept a comin’/ Not quite as many as there was a while ago./ We fired again and the British took to runnin’/ down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.”) Jackson went on to a career of ethnic cleansing and a presidency that would serve as a fitting model for Donald Trump. Is it only in Egypt that violence has crafted identities and set boundaries?

Clark’s fortitude rivaled the Delaware crossing of Washington, whom Clark took pride in physically resembling. But he suffered from grudging reimbursement of his expenses, ill repute, and alcoholism. After he tumbled drunk or apoplectic into a blazing fireplace, his leg was amputated. Did this mishap result from self-destructive rage? I could identify with that. Recognition came too late to make much difference for him. He died an embittered, frustrated prodigy. Few are likely to shed a tear nowadays for Clark or any of our Indian-removing, slave-holding ancestors; but by the standards of the time, he deserved better. Since I’ve lived near the slippery banks of those rivers he forded, I can imagine how it might have been for him to lead poorly equipped, underfed, grumbling, mutiny-prone volunteers in winter through frigid, chest-deep currents, clambering up muddy banks and stumbling over driftwood and fallen tree trunks, to surprise the British garrison at Vincennes. Clark was by any standard a leader and visionary. But alas, the British surrendered without heroic violence. No slaughter, no glory!

Southern Illinois was settled early, and it participated in the epic founding struggles of our nation; but few traces of the heroic phase engraved themselves in memory. One reason is the nature of the settlers. By most accounts, the white settlers who began to inhabit the territory between the rivers fit the type of the land grabber or speculator. The less ambitious were drawn by the promise of free land: free of charge and free of social organization and unwanted neighbors. These low-end speculators cleared a plot of acreage, lived from it with little ambition, and in most cases either went back where they came from or moved further west to try their luck in some new setting. Anyone who has read Laura Engels Wilder’s Little House series is familiar with the pattern. The more far-sighted speculators assessed the lay of the land and bet that investment in locations such as Shawneetown or Cairo would yield future wealth. It looked like a sure thing given the importance of river transport. Who could foresee railroads and interstate highways? Just as the frontier settlers lacked ambition, the river town speculators waited passively for their investment to pay off through luck and outsider initiative. The early rural farms and river towns of Southern Illinois were variants of the same hazard-addicted, restless yet lazy way of life. Both pioneers and river people were fated to lose out in the long run: the pioneers because they chose a soil poorer than the northern prairie. Supposedly this was because they mistrusted a prairie soil that grew no trees, or because the grass-meshed prairie ground was too hard to break with their primitive plows; or because Egypt simply looked prettier to the rural folk who migrated in from the southern hill country. The river towns lost because neither fluvial highwater nor the course of history respected their gambit. They got flooded out and left high and dry by overland transit. When I was growing up, those early settlers figured into a triumphalist narrative leading to the pinnacle that coincided with us. Now they look like buckskin-clad gambler-losers who bequeathed us their penchant for serial failure.

The most original of the histories of Illinois I’ve had recent occasion to read was Richard J. Jensen’s Illinois: A Bicentennial History (New York: Norton, 1978). Jensen downplays rote chronology to contrast two ideal types: the pioneer traditionalist (the above-mentioned typology) and the modernizer. The former is anarchic yet patriarchal; by inclination a Baptist and a Southerner, ever in search of greener pastures. The modernizer, who is by type a Methodist, plans for the future and thinks and acts strategically. The modernizer eventually dominates the northern parts of the state and all of Illinois. The traditionalist, however, was the more common type among the early settlers and therefore the most prevalent type in Southern Illinois. The contrast of the two types is overgeneralized by Jensen, but I am sure that the frontier did produce many examples of the traditionalist. That they lived by hunting and dwelt beyond the reach of the law were conditions imposed by circumstance. If Jensen sometimes risks cliché, his objective is to critique a sentimental stereotype: “it is a false myth to attribute a golden age of arts and crafts to the early settlers” (11). Only the most primitive needs could be satisfied. Like me, these early no-nonsense settlers in Southern Illinois were shy and temperamentally inclined to asceticism. Their need for little and their lack of materialistic ambition made possible their kind of freedom. And mine.

Looking back on those settlers, I can see how their restless drive rode the cycles of risk, luck, and loss. The cycles rolled on even in my family, in my father’s business ventures, in the rise and fall of the coal and oil industry, and the growth and downsizing of Southern Illinois University. And what about my non-conformist intellectual pursuits for which I secretly craved recognition? And my passionate but self-conscious identification with a world literature I read from my fifteenth year on? For me, literature was a personal code of honor: the holy writ that set me apart and validated my Steppenwolf existence. I was never happier than when I embraced the risk of setting off on my own by financing my study in West Berlin in 1972-73 with factory overtime earnings, or by turning down job offers and applying my speculative profits from the overvalued dollar of the mid-1980s to research and write for a few years in complete freedom and isolation. Those were my forest clearings in which I could do as I liked, beholden to none, free to indulge grandiose dreams of future recognition.

But I am a modest and quiet scholar. Isn’t that the diametrical opposite of those crude, violence-prone pioneers? Not entirely. Like them, I shun social artifice; but I, too, have a latent capacity to take matters into my own hands when I feel that boundaries have been violated. Once, not so many years ago, this inclination led me to behave aggressively and threaten a man with violence. At the time, I understood this as a necessary regression to an archaic condition in which right had to be asserted with force. And yes, I was motivated by an archaic sense of “honor,” by the obligation to protect my mother when the law couldn’t be relied on in her village. One could debate whether I was justified. I certainly surprised a few people including myself. But as it turned out, my threat of violence was counterproductive. The end did not justify the means. The means attained the end only to defeat itself. From this experience, I can imagine the mentality of the early settlers who were driven by their sense of outraged justice to “lay down the law.” One could debate specifics, but there can be no doubt that their self-righteousness resulted in murder for the sake of “honor” as well as mob action and even lynching.

My study of early modern German mystical and dissenting writings has trained me to look for latent biblical and classical structures in writings which are not explicitly theological. In books on Southern Illinois, I can discern the archetypes of demonology and providence, Cain and Abel, Arcadian serenity, the fall from grace, and the promise of deliverance. With or without the authors’ awareness, these structures are inherent. People were conditioned to think in those terms. This is evident in books on Williamson County and Cairo. Both places are infamous for their history of violence and injustice. In Cairo, it was racism, though the roots were deep and convoluted. In the case of “Bloody Williamson,” it was a matter of vendettas, nativism, and strike-related violence. Bloody Williamson: A Chapter in American Lawlessness is the title of a book of regional history which has been reprinted and gained a certain popularity because of a local patriotism that takes pride in owning its badass reputation (Paul M. Angle, Intro. John Y. Simon. A Prairie State Book [Urbana: University of Illinois, 1992]; first ed. New York: Knopf, 1952). This regional best-seller takes its nineteenth-century material from an earlier volume. It retails accounts of murderous feuds, Klan and nativist violence, racism, militant unionism, and the slaughter of strike-breakers. Its nineteenth century sources were compiled by a local lawyer named Milo Erwin (The Bloody Vendetta: History of Williamson County, Illinois, From the Earliest Times, Down to the Present. Marion, Illinois, 1876; copyrighted Herrin, Illinois: The Herrin News, 1914). Erwin is criticized for his overheated rhetoric; and he can be faulted for his positivistic enumeration of murders and acts of vengeance. Nevertheless, precisely his florid embellishment and lapidary listing of killings contain hints lost in Angle’s more sophisticated reworking of Erwin’s nineteenth-century material.

Erwin prefaces his book: “GENTLEMEN: I have now written you a history of your own county, to show you the advantages of civilization, and to give you contentment” (xi). The author is ingenuous in addressing his fellow (male) residents and regarding his county with the eye of the patriotic resident, extolling the benefits of a civilization which are endangered and precarious in Williamson County. Looking back to the early beginnings, Erwin offers an arcadian panorama of game, birds, and Indians. Known if not native to the region, is the noble chief Tecumseh, a leader so admired by white people that General Tecumseh Sherman was named after him (13). But the magnanimous chief is followed by “dirty, greasy, filthy Indians” (15), who appear to be awe-struck intruders in the arcadian darkness of the Illinois Territory: “As they wandered along its shores they passed forests whose somber depths were veiled to them by a vast screen of drooping birch . . . and then, entering one of Nature’s solemn temples, what weird, wonderous visions greeted their thrilled senses!” (14). Darkness is ever alluring.

Since no streams rise from the littoral of French settlements on the Mississippi to Williamson County, Erwin reckons that the first white men to have set foot there were George Rogers Clark and his men in the late eighteenth century (18). The white hunters who follow get on well with the Indians (21); but when permanent settlements are erected, the settlers live in fear of savages (21). Of those earliest settlers, two-thirds depend on hunting. Hence, they lived “like the Indians, mostly in the woods” (24). Erwin asserts their racial purity: “They were poor, but of unmixed blood. There were no half-breeds, neither of Indians nor other obnoxious races.” “In private life they lived with republican austerity, and in society moved with chivalrous spirit” (26). “The world has not exhibited a more happy race than our early settlers. Their kindness was bounded only by their capacity. . . . While some of them had vices of savages, most of them had the virtues of men. They were true to their country, true to their friends, their homes and their God” (28). And yet those early settlers included in addition to the honest hunters and farmers, a “vagrant class that sprung [sic] up in the last forty years, who roamed through the woods uninfluenced by attachment and unfettered by principle, stealing hogs and sheep” (27-28). Fortunately, these foul vagrants “have all disappeared” (28). In positing his primal state of innocence and nobility, the patriot of Williamson County thus appears incoherent in pinpointing the font of evil in his envisioned Eden. His positivistic enumeration of pious marvels and brutal murders offers clues.

When it comes to the beliefs of these earliest settlers, Erwin reprises and praises a standard of religion familiar to me from my study of early Protestant dissent. He rejects doctrines or “isms” and recognizes “that religion, engraven on the heart . . . the religion of our first parents” [thus older than Christianity]: “It is the religion of all ages and all people. Sages have never ceased to worship in silence this religion. While fanatics and fools have tinged the earth with blood of men by discussions and religious disputes, they [the uncomplicated faithful of the heart] have laid aside systems and applied themselves to doing good, the only road to happiness” (54). Erwin records conflicts caused by denominational differences as well as political ones (56). Though he exalts education, he ascribes to the old-time religion of singing, shouting, and spontaneously praising God the capacity “to throw off the dogmas and superstitions of early days, such as witchcraft, etc., and assume a station above the vale of serfdom, far upon the plains of common sense” (54). This spontaneous religion of the heart not only freed its adherents; its peculiar authority either absorbed or served as an antidote to the darkness of witchcraft. An antidote was sorely needed. Erwin reports on the prevalence of conjuring, especially on the east side of his county (60): “To the witch was ascribed the usual powers of inflicting strange diseases . . . and inflicting curses and spells on guns” (60). Magic is mortal rivalry pursued by supernatural means. The “intellectual fires” of the Williamson County witches and their competitors in neighboring counties enjoyed notoriety:

None of the wizards of this county could do anything with Eva [i.e., an old hag who “could do wonders, and inflict horrible spells on the young, such as fits, twitches, jerks and such like”]. They had to pale their intellectual fires and sink into insignificance before the great wizard of Hamilton County [i.e., Charley Lee, the “witch-master” of the nearby county who alone was a match for Eva’s gun spells]. When a man concluded that his neighbor was killing too many deer around his field, he would spell his gun, which he did by going out early in the morning, and, on hearing the crack of his rifle he walked backward to a hickory wythe [twig?], which he tied in a knot in the name of the devil. This rendered the [other’s] gun worthless until the knot was untied . . . (61).

It seems from this that sorcery channeled the hostility that might have otherwise led to bloody feuding. The boundary between folk piety and witchcraft was porous: “There was an idea, too, that if you read certain books used by the Hard-shell Baptists, that the devil would appear” (62). The Primitive or Hard-shell or “foot-washing Baptists”—so-called for their emulation of Christ’s example of humble succor—chose their lay preachers, rejected all hierarchy, and were therefore free of clerical constraints. Erwin writes that fortunately the “absurd pretentions” of superstition have been discontinued “by an enlightened public” in his own day (62). Yet it will be precisely in his post-bellum age of enlightenment that the “Bloody Vendetta” of Erwin’s title is destined to terrorize his county for years on end.

Erwin has collected the available criminological information. He lists it in chronological order. “The first homicide occurred in 1813. Thomas Griffee was trying to shoot a bear out of a tree . . . and he saw an Indian aiming his gun at the same bear. Griffee leveled his rifle at the Indian and shot him dead” (92-93). Elsewhere, the author mentions that “Griffee had a character for killing every Indian he could catch in the woods” (16). Erwin notes that, “Early hunters were more like the primitive savage than any other men.” “By natural instinct they were ever alive to guard against danger and provide food.” “Of law they knew but little; their wish was law, and to obtain this they did not scruple at the means or cost; but these strong, active honest backwoodsmen were firm friends and generous men.” (43) If it appears that their occasional slide into homicide came from living like the Indians, Erwin observes elsewhere that only one killing of a settler by an Indian was even rumored in the county (93). Race is a factor: “The next murder occurred in 1814. Thomas Griffee had a man working in a saltpeter cave for him, by the name of Eliott, who was a little colored. He came into Griffee’s one Saturday night, and a surveyor by the name of John Hicks raised a fuss with him, and stabbed and killed him.” When he flees, a band of Indians offers to set off in pursuit; but Griffee and a friend stop them, track Hicks down, and deliver him to the seat of governmental authority at Kaskaskia, where a Justice of the Peace has him “whipped, cropped and branded,” and then released (93).

Next to be recounted are the murders committed by the vicious ruffian and woodsman Henry Parsons. In 1818, Parsons is marauding through the woods when he shoots and kills a man seated on a log. In his defense, he claims that he thought the man was an Indian, and “that the Indians had murdered his father, and he intended to kill every one of them he could find” (94). Hated and despised by all, the killer haunts a county prairie, murdering Native Americans (95). In 1833, a certain Youngblood who is inciting his dog to kill a snake is shot for no clear reason by a certain Alexander, who immediately feels remorse and comes to the aid of the wounded man. The latter eventually succumbs; but no action is taken, though murder or manslaughter is taken for granted (97). Next come brawl-related homicides. A man attempting to intervene in a fight is stabbed and killed. A dog fight leads to a killing, as does a horse race (98). A boy seeks out and murders a woman for having had “too much business” with his father. A transient Irishman insults the wife of a local man and is killed for the affront (99).

Erwin mentions the early ambiguous presence of slaves and freed black people in the county. In 1818, slavery was abolished, and many, though not all, slaves were manumitted in Illinois (51). “Most of the citizens of this county were from the South; but few of them brought slaves with them” (51). Yet, “It was a presumption of law that all negroes were slaves, and hence they could not settle in this county without providing their freedom” (52). Rejection of slavery and the exclusion of black folk reflected Illinois’ status as a “free” state with residual slavery (see M. Scott Herman, The Alchemy of Slavery: Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country. 1730-1865 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). Hence the treatment of non-whites: “The negroes were sometimes kidnapped and taken South, and sold, and sometimes taken East and freed” (51). Crowd sentiment could swing either for or against the oppressed: “About the year 1857, a negro girl, living near Marion, was kidnapped by a band of ruffians, who started South with her to sell her into bondage; but such a thing was too grating to the souls of our people. The hue and cry was levied, and she was rescued . . . and restored to that liberty and freedom which gave to all of nature” (52). Had she arrived from elsewhere, she would have met with suspicion; but her kidnapping from among them offended the souls of white people.

When the Civil War begins, many of the Douglas Democrats of Southern Illinois sympathize with the South, and there is even talk of succession from the state; but for various reasons the population on the whole resolves to remain loyal. The prominent politician John A. Logan opts for the Union, and others follow his lead. Even in Southern Illinois there are principled opponents of slavery (such as my great-grandfather who with his grown sons fought for the Union throughout the war, losing a teenaged son in 1862). A side-effect of the conflict seems to have been the brutalization of Williamson County. Aroused by the passions of war, the violence recounted by Erwin increases. Unlike “Bleeding Kansas,” the local pattern doesn’t fall into neatly organized parties. Though sentiments for or, especially, against the Union play a large role, Little Egypt produces nothing like a John Brown or Quantrill’s Raiders.

In Williamson County, murders involve Union soldiers who either kill or get killed. A man suspected of betraying the hiding place of deserters is murdered at night. An ardent Republican is assassinated while hunting for his horses in the woods (100). Deserters or their allies commit murder in gangs. Killings are frequent during the war years, but the motive is not always known (102). Republicans are murdered at the end of the war, in one instance by a fellow Republican (103). The homicides continue. An outspoken Republican whose politics have aroused enmity is killed (106). A seventy-three-year old white man is ordered by the newly formed Ku Klux Klan to flee the county. When he refuses, he is lynched at night (107). A Colonel Ambrose Spencer who attempts to prosecute suspects for this crime fails to convict and is himself fined (109). Many of the killings result from petty conflicts and fights between otherwise upright and decent citizens. Erwin is puzzled that the Bloody Vendetta involves such upstanding families. The immediate causes—a game of cards, a minor business quarrel, casual insults—strike him as petty. Moreover, there are Union veterans on both sides of the metastasizing feud. The genocidal slaughter of Indians and the Civil War may have lent force to altercations so that the legacy of legitimized murder morphs into a diffuse brutality which saturates society.

Too little of this background is salvaged by the professional historian Paul M. Angle. Eliminating the pathos and the puzzling details, Angle garnishes Erwin’s tally of murder and mayhem with the cliché of hardy, ignorant southern mountain people, good-natured but quick to take offense—as if northern cities and towns had been less prone to gang violence and revenge. Instead of an uptick in a sequence of violence nourished by the conquest of hunting grounds, racism, partisanship, and war, Angle offers the reader the Southern Illinois equivalent of the hillbilly clan war, a starker, more digestible tragedy with picturesque highlights. Various factors drove the Williamson County Bloody Vendetta: festering grudges, alliances between families, murders of bystanders and potential witnesses, and not least of all the incompetence and cowardice of the local officials. Bad publicity throughout the state resulted in large cash rewards being posted. This led to the arrest of a key witness named Samuel Music. Music gets drunk and sings. A certain Marshall Crain is tried for carrying out revenge murders for pay. He is convicted and publicly hanged after a great show of Christian remorse and conversion. Several of the principals of the vendetta receive substantial prison sentences. This puts a brake on the cycle of killings (Angle 72-88). For a time at least.

In county, state, and nation, the reputation of a vendetta-prone Williamson persisted, reinforced by episodes of group violence that play out in Angle’s dramatic narrative as a sequence of lurid spectacles on a small-town stage. But the driving forces behind the lurid plot lines are hardly local. Some of the most notorious villains were born elsewhere. The Ku Klux Klan putschist of Williamson County, a mini-Mussolini named S. Glenn Young, was from rural Kansas. The most flamboyant local gangster, Charlie Birger, was born in a Jewish stetl of the Russian Empire. Neither was a product of the southern hill country. This aside, Angle’s account of early twentieth-century violence in Williamson is detailed and insightful and a very good read. It complements the sagas of Al Capone and Huey Long and offers an antidote to the small-town idylls that graced American popular culture in the twentieth century.

Since Angle wrote Bloody Williamson in order to hook and reel in his readers, he begins with the most notorious bloodshed: a blow-by-blow account of the massacre of surrendering white strike-breakers outside Herrin in 1922. Next comes the background of labor conflicts in preceding months. Moving on to their aftermath, Angle concludes that, “No episode in the history of American industrial warfare has ever shocked public opinion more violently than the Herrin massacre” (28). And it is shocking to read of the vicious shooting, hanging, and beating by miners of their surrendered prisoners, or of the miners’ wives, children, and bystanders who spat or urinated on the dead and dying. But only after five chapters do we learn, as if it were unrelated, that two decades before the massacre a mine operator had countered strikers’ demands by hiring African American workers from the South. Against armed violence, the black arrivals defended themselves as best they could. More recently, a mine owner had resisted union demands by importing Eastern European and Italian workers along with black miners from Kentucky (130). They worked under siege conditions in the company town of Zeigler until three mining disasters resulting from company negligence forced the owner’s hand and the United Mine Workers won recognition (131-33). This happened a little over a decade before the infamous massacre. In Southern Illinois and elsewhere, industrial conflicts were conditioned by racism and ethnic tensions; but the Herrin massacre of 1922 was perpetrated against white strikebreakers. As the captives were marched off and the crowd talked up its thirst for blood, the white miners incited an armed black man in their ranks to abuse the prisoners. According to Angle, a miner called to him, “See these white sons-of-bitches that we don’t think as much of as we do of you, colored boy!” (4) Participation in violence was a condition of belonging. The miners of Southern Illinois included Italian, Slavic, and Hungarian immigrants who were targets of nativist hostility during this period.

Angle documents his gripping reports of battles between the Ku Klux Klan and their opponents and of the anti-Klan bootlegging gangs against one another; but his narrative organization obfuscates the temporal sequence of conflicts, their cumulative reinforcement, and their coincidence with forces and conflicts in the broader context. The violence in the heart of Little Egypt was a microcosm of a global epoch conditioned by postwar strife, free-wheeling modernity, and proto-fascist anti-modernity. Until I read Bloody Williamson, I didn’t know how much the revived Ku Klux Klan of Little Egypt was driven by its fanatical will to enforce Prohibition. The Klan’s campaign against bootleggers and illegal alcohol consumption required eliminating the kind of corruption blamed in Weimar Germany on Jews or in Cairo, Illinois, on African Americans. The Klan campaign was no less directed against wine-drinking immigrants than against any sin excoriated by Christian revivalists. Like Fascism, Klan-led intimidation crusaded to reclaim a virtuous past and cleanse nation and region of unsavory foreign elements. My first inkling that the Klan in Southern Illinois was not solely motivated by its racism came from a story my mother told me of a distant relative by marriage. His association with the family was so attenuated that his Klan activities inspired more derision than shame. He was a big, powerful man, a Baptist lay preacher. With his Klan associates, he tried to intimidate a Jewish doctor by parading in Klan regalia in front of the physician’s house; but the doctor called their bluff by coming out and telling them that he knew who was under the sheets and that they were only making fools of themselves. Frustrated, the Klan preacher rode the Illinois Central south to confront Williamson County bootleggers. When he strode into their lair to preach the fear of God, they made quick work of his sermon. Shot through the chest, he was barely able to ride the train home and stagger from the station to his house before collapsing and dying on his doorstep. It was a time of spectacular violence in Egypt and the world.

The years 1919-1920 saw the passing of the eighteenth amendment and introduction of the Volstead Act banning alcohol as well as the Palmer Raids expelling suspect foreigners. The Herrin massacre of 1922 set a local precedent of violence and vigilantism. Bootlegging flourished in Southern Illinois with profitable markets in the St. Louis metropolitan area. In 1923, the Klan mobilized to clean things up. In their regalia, they paraded into churches, gave speeches in praise of Christian morals, and presented pastors with cash awards for their support. The Klan recruited influential local citizens and expanded. Since officers of the law were doing too little to curtail illegal alcohol production and use (they were often on the take), the Klan vowed to fill the breach vigilante-style. To this purpose, they brought in the strange and flamboyant S. Glenn Young, a preposterous Kansas farm boy who embodied essential undercurrents of American culture even while resonating with universal tendencies of the time. A full-figure photograph of Young reveals a bow-legged, blank-eyed mannequin in a fanciful military-style outfit that combines elements of the soldier (Montana peak army hat), the stormtrooper (puttees and khaki shirt and tie), the cowboy (pearl-handled automatics worn on either hip), and the G-man (cradled tommy gun). Fancying himself both a patriot and a gunslinger, Young made his reputation chasing down draft dodgers in the mountainous rural South during the patriotic fervor of the First World War. After the war, he served in prohibition enforcement until the government fired him for shooting dead an immigrant whose house Young had invaded without a warrant. There were allegations of pocketing money seized on his raids. His first wife divorced him for physical abuse. He was a publicity-hungry, vainglorious loose cannon and motor mouth, in short, the man of the hour.

Or at least so the local Klan leaders who recruited him thought. Like the classic Fascist thug hired by the authorities to deal with undesirables, Young usurped the authority to decide who was or was not desirable. This meant bullying the court to release a fellow Klansman arrested in possession of a bottle of illegal hooch. Soon, an anti-Klan force mobilized against Young: The Knights of the Flaming Circle. Prominent among its members were the bootlegging Shelton brothers, Carl, Earl, and Bernie. The police and officials were so weak, opportunistic, and corrupt that they might serve either side or, if possible, both at once. The shooting of a Klansman’s son, coupled with Young’s unbridled aggression, polarized the situation. When the sheriff was forced to take a stand, Young and the Klan staged a coup. They shot up a hospital that sheltered their perceived enemies and arrested and jailed the county sheriff and the mayor of Herrin. Williamson’s mini-Mussolini declared himself the law in person and took his seat, heavily armed, on the judge’s bench. Not for the first or last time, national guard troops were called in to restore order. As the war between these pro-Klan and anti-Klan forces raged on, even the Klan leadership disassociated itself from its uncontrollable hireling.

The opposing forces centered on Ora Thomas, a deputy sheriff with a checkered past and credentials that left no doubt about his sangfroid. He was a World War I combat veteran who worked for years as a miner: a slight, reticent man, unflappable and unforgiving. The Klan objected to him because he had been associated with one of the region’s racketeers. His modest living conditions and employment in the mines do not hint, however, at a lucrative corruption. I suspect that the lines were blurred between law-abiding Christians and prohibition criminals in the rural areas where family, friendship, and enmity cut across moral and religious boundaries.

The series of lethal confrontations in Angle’s Bloody Williamson features several spectacular battles and deadly altercations, each of which would be ripe for cinematic treatment. Young and Thomas strode around Herrin armed with handguns on the brink of violence, until the deputy found his Klan nemesis causing a disturbance in a cigar store. He heard Young berating a coal miner for calling him a scab. A spark flared and in the shootout Thomas, Young, and two of Young’s supporters were mortally wounded or killed outright. A procession of miners bore Thomas to his final resting place from the porch of his house which was too narrow to host the wake indoors. Young’s funeral was the occasion for lavish commemorative sermons and Klan demonstrations by tens of thousands. It is depressing to consider the abiding appeal of this ludicrous and reactionary blowhard after the government and even the Klan leadership itself lost confidence in the man in the Montana peak army hat.

As a child, I didn’t hear anything about the Ku Klux Klan in Southern Illinois. Postwar Germans had an equal ability to repress a past that lay within living memory of the older generation. What we heard about was the lurid, legendary saga of gang warfare which we refashioned, Hatfield and McCoy-style, into a war between the “Birgers and the Sheltons.” We reflexively edited the information we received to conform to the hillbilly plotline of warring family clans with roots in the southern mountain country. It is true that the ruthless, taciturn Shelton brothers were sons of a poor but God-fearing farmer who had migrated from Kentucky; but there were no Birgers as such, only the associates of Charley Birger, the son of a Jewish emigrant who proceeded from Russia via St. Louis to Southern Illinois. Birger is the most colorful and intriguing character in the lore of the region and in many ways the diametrical opposite of Young. As the gang boss of Harrisburg in neighboring Saline County, he was charming and paternalistic toward his adopted home, unlike Young who could be irascible and bullying with friend and foe alike. Birger had been allied with the Sheltons in resisting the Klan; but after Young’s death and the Klan defeat, Birger and the Sheltons became mortal enemies, purportedly because they refused to help him smuggle in his Russian Jewish relatives via Florida or perhaps because he withheld too much in a joint illegal operation, or possibly both. What came of it was the gang war about which we learned in our youth. It involved raids on roadhouses, gunfire from armored trucks, and even an attempted aerial bombing of Birger’s roadhouse headquarters, which was later successfully dynamited. Both sides tried to use the law and courts to their advantage. Birger did so with initial success; but he went too far by having a small-town mayor and a traitorous policeman and his wife murdered. He was convicted and publicly hanged in nearby Benton on April 19, 1928. At the very end, he allowed a rabbi to accompany him. The last words of the condemned were, “It is a beautiful world.” Birger had a flair for the theatrical. In the old photographs, he looks like a gleefully armed Jay Gatsby in his tailor-made bullet-proof vest posing atop a roadster with fifteen gun-toting pals. Declaiming his last words on the scaffold, he looks in the photo as if he were auditioning to play Mack the Knife in The Threepenny Opera.

The Sheltons nominally won the war. They were authentic sons of Southern Illinois, farm boys with roots in the South: strong, taciturn, soft-spoken—yet so hated in the area that for decades one family member after another was assassinated, shot off his tractor or picked off for no immediate reason by unknown snipers. In contrast to this murderous hatred of the Sheltons, “many people [according to Angle] chose to see Birger as a public benefactor rather than as a killer, bootlegger, and ex-convict” (213). He provided coal to poor households in hard winters and textbooks to children whose families couldn’t afford them. He forbade Harrisburgers from visiting his gambling dens to protect them from losses and even saw to it that a thief who had stolen from a local was tracked down and dealt with and the stolen property returned. How is it possible that Birger—who, as a Jew and an Eastern European immigrant, embodied features despised by nativist Christians—inherited a warmer place in Egyptian memory than the Sheltons? I don’t think that this came about either through philosemitic equanimity or Birger’s benevolence. Millionaires aren’t necessarily sanctified by their largesse. I suspect that in the popular consciousness, Birger had paid his admission fee with his spectacular acts of violence, whether legal (as a Spanish-American War-era cavalryman) or extralegal (he first gained notoriety by killing two men in three days and getting off on grounds of self-defense). His vengeance upon a thief who robbed a Harrisburg man served the dual purpose of securing affection and sowing fear. The authorities, for their part, didn’t offer any shining contrast of propriety. As a coda to Birger’s execution, the State’s Attorney and Klansman Arlie Boswell was convicted and sentenced to prison for taking bribes from racketeers. The question is whether the reverberations of forgotten events continue to influence us.

When I was a teenager, my friends and I patronized an establishment run by the Foster sisters, two hardened old women in a village outside Harrisburg called Muddy which besides illicit drinking sported an abandoned coal mine and the Russian orthodox church that had served the local miners. We called Fosters’ a “roadhouse” which lent it an air of bygone notoriety. I remember getting sick in the parking lot to the maudlin strains of Elvis’s Return to Sender. The refrain has a deeper meaning for me now: “Address unknown, no such number, no such zone.” My Egypt is a zone of anarchic and lethal spirits.

When I reflect back on it all now, it seems to me that the lure of intoxication, of getting high, whether on religion, whisky, or drugs, is a driving force that cannot be discounted against economics, politics, or social structures. The earliest settlers who sought freedom in darkness were notoriously given over either to their ecstatic religion or their whisky. William James, who took religious experience seriously, considered inebriation a baser version of mystical ecstasy. For the majority then or now, existence is a drudge, at worst enervating and uncertain, at best, under stable conditions, monotonously stultifying. It’s the soulless grind, the mind-numbing routine, the Midwestern malaise. Yet the coals always glow in the darkness, waiting to be fanned into flame by the thrill of the new, the dare of setting off and risking everything, wandering afar, venturing or enterprising, getting happy on drink or high on drugs. Such were the impulses that drew the settlers here and perhaps the Indians before them. The impulse doesn’t die with settled acquisition. It seeks new paths to a more intense experience. For the spiritually susceptible, deliverance is the ecstasy of singing, praying, or communing with the Highest. For those eager to learn, it means attaining knowledge and truth. Let’s call these the material and spiritual paths to heightened consciousness, or the downward and upward paths. No matter how settled we become, the ashes still glow in the dark to be kindled into a freer, more fulfilling existence. The thrill of freedom and the lure of intense experience beckon. Darkness beckons. The material path might entail acquiring property, ingesting substances, or seeking erotic adventure. The spiritual path is the longer route to enlightenment. The material rises, then falls. The spiritual trends gradually upward. Put mystically, the first loses its way in darkness; the second discerns in the pervasive darkness a faint diaspora of light.

The mystic Jacob Boehme, whom I’ve studied at great length, borrowed his central metaphor from the Gospel of John: the light shines into a darkness which is a matrix of everything that arises; but the darkness cannot grasp it. Sensing the light but lacking an object, the darkness contracts upon itself. Its contraction or vain grasping for the light lends substance to desire. Longing turns into fulfillment and frustration. The pioneer seeks freedom, only to settle into the mind-numbing drudge of occupation. The dulled senses attain release in intoxication, only to descend into the suffering and anger of the addict. The frustrated lash out in anger, only to degenerate into the hardened condition of the abuser. The greedy grasp for more, only to sink under the weight of ownership. Only the mortifying shock of self-recognition can liberate the hardened soul for joy, harmony, and love. Wanting without knowing or finding an object was Boehme’s life of darkness. The life of darkness is a crossroads leading either toward the hardening of blind passion or the liberation of insight, understanding, and knowledge. The Baroque mystic painted the inner life in the colors of alchemy and astrology, pseudo-sciences with an expressiveness as forceful as the hermetic symbols of modern art. For me, ascent lies in the institutions and gifts of learning, of studies, books, libraries, schools, universities, intellectual exchanges, and all the self-transformations that constitute the multifaceted educational process. This illumination might seem fainter, but it is more transforming than intoxication, greed, ownership, anger, or domination. Egypt’s magicians and revelers would have sought these intellectual fires in vain.

I’m drawing back into my mystical studies. Instead of summarizing the books I’ve read—Roger Biles, Illinois: A History of the Land and Its People (DeKalb: NIU Press, 2005); Robert P. Howard, A History of the Prairie State (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972); John Hoffmann (ed.), A Guide to the History of Illinois (New York: Greenwood, 1991); or George Washington Smith, A History of Southern Illinois: A Narrative Account of its Historical Progress, its People, and its Principal Interests, vol. 1 (Chicago and New York: Lewis, 1912)—I’m falling back on Pascal’s mystical dictum that “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” and Schopenhauer’s thesis that all striving leads to suffering.

3. Depths of Egyptian Darkness

The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever-shifting, muffled sound of his pick?
Herman Melville, Moby Dick.

The geologists tell us that around 350 to 500 million years ago Illinois and the Midwest lay beneath a shallow tropical ocean in which the forms of life evolved. By a “mere” 325 million years ago, the ocean had receded, leaving behind a vast delta swamp where scurrying reptiles, rapacious amphibians, and crocodile-sized cockroaches lurked beneath a canopy of exotic but discernibly tropical vegetation. The tropical foliage is buried in the depths of an inaccessible prehistory, yet I have examined such foliage up close, preserved in the coal seam of a Southern Illinois mine which I visited with my miner brother.

We rode from the surface down to a maze of dark tunnels, extensive as a city hundreds of feet below. In a side passage, we turned off our helmet lamps to sample a darkness deeper than any I could have imagined. Tiny pellets of coal zinged through the air like crossfire. The imponderable weight of the earth pressed them out. Ground water trickled through the ceiling and pooled on the floor. Clumps of ceiling fell. A chill wind blasted through the maze to minimize the accumulation of ignitable coal dust. This was in the early Eighties before long-wall mining mechanized extraction to the fullest and reduced demand for a large contingent of swarming bodies below ground. Obscure figures thronged the tunnels, erratically illuminated by head lamps. The miners recognized only two classes of beings, “bosses” and “men” (though by then there were also women miners). To the author of Germinal, that great nineteenth-century naturalistic novel of mining, this scene might not have appeared unfamiliar. Perhaps Zola would have missed his blind draft horse Bataille—the wretched creature that came into the world, toiled, and perished, always far below the light of day.

We rode in an electric cart to the coal face: a football field-sized chamber through which a cross-hatch of horizontal alleys had been excavated. At the coal face, a machine called an “automatic miner” was driven by a lone operator who fired it to lunge like a raging monster into the subterranean earth. Every thrust made the ground tremble beneath our feet. Its metal teeth tore into the seam and spewed out tons of raw coal which was transported on belts through shafts in shuttles to the surface. The job we were observing was the removal of the “pillars of coal” left behind to support the earth after the cross-hatch of tunnels had been completed. The pillars were removed in a diagonal pattern after which the surface above would subside. The company had an interest in rapid and complete removal. According to my brother, the management favored for this task younger men eager to prove themselves. If the operator took out too much too fast, thousands of tons of earth might crash down on him. I was told that recently a young operator had seen his fellow workers signaling an imminent collapse by shaking their head lamps back and forth. A steel canopy over the operator’s seat might have saved him from the worst; but he panicked, leaped from his perch, and dashed for safety, only to be buried alive after a few steps. I could imagine the same happening to us when the entire earth shook from each lunge.

With this in mind and the deafening roar of the machine in my ears, I tried to focus to keep panic in check. I noticed embedded in the wall next to me, glistening from the light of my head lamp, the outline of a fern and the stems and leaves of exotic tropical plants which may have been extinct for a hundred million years. My absorption was intensified both by the novelty of observing the glittering black contours of a prehistoric swamp and by my willed suppression of the claustrophobic scene in front of me. Terror reinforced my impression of petrified plants and froze their image in my memory.

After writing down this recollection, I have a dream of my brother during the deep phase of my sleep. I meet him in the dark passageways of a movie theater where he is the ticket-taker. On my way into the pitch-dark movie corridor, I meet old friends from our childhood who invite us to join them at a movie theater next-door. Since my brother is on duty collecting tickets, he shows me how to clamber over seats into a hidden passageway leading to the neighboring theater. When a manager comes down the hidden corridor toward us, we have to slink back and hide. Waking up, I remember other half-forgotten dreams that played out in a strange region which I nonetheless understood to be the towns and countryside of my childhood, peopled by my next of kin but like so many dream realities both familiar and off-key. The mine tunnels were transformed into labyrinthine movie house corridors with obscure scenarios accessible through cues recalled from other dreams. I had evidently been having recurrent dreams like this. My deceased loved ones and the lost world of my childhood are merging in the underground cities of mineshaft-cinemas hewn into forests of prehistoric swamps.

If any deeper significance is to be found in this dream, it doesn’t lie in the complexities of my psyche but in the layers of reality to which I was exposed without giving them much thought. An enlightened school system would educate its children about whatever of the past survives in discernible remnants. Growing up in Southern Illinois, we heard about the ancient ruins of the Cahokia Mounds people. The Trail of Tears was a familiar concept. We visited old slave quarters which were maintained as a tourist attraction. But none of this gained much context or connection with our situation in the world. It should have. We should have been transported by those remnants into the alternate worlds of our Southern Illinois past and present instead of the escapist scenarios of 1950s cinema.

I’ve driven right by the Cahokia Mounds site countless times on my way to St. Louis. You see the exit signs for the state historical site just before you’re forced to concentrate on navigating the interchanges that take you over the Mississippi into the city. You pass the monument to Mother Jones and another for the Shrine of Our Lady of the Snows. There are too many attractions to process: first the miracle of a Roman snowfall on a hot August day in A.D. 358 that institutes a wonder-working shrine to the Virgin Mary; and then the radical trade union organizer Mother Jones, rallying miners, as in an Italian neorealist film, to march through the Southern Illinois mining towns and protest exploitation. These attractions are followed abruptly by the “Greatest City of Ancient North America.” Too many worlds playing simultaneously in the Egyptian Cineplex! It’s hard to picture them in succession while leaving the Illinois side of the St. Louis metropolitan area. As a teenager, I would drive by here to visit my engineer father in the city. I would visit art theaters and department stores in the declining downtown while he worked during the day. I never exited to Cahokia.

The problem of any honest attempt to imagine the world of the prehistoric Cahokia people is that they left no written records. We know very little about their culture and decline. Archeologists have reconstructed the layout and contours of ancient Cahokia. It arose around a millenium ago to become the largest urban site north of Mexico. A surplus of corn production presumably made its expansion and influence possible. It drew on sources of stone or shell from the Rockies to the Gulf of Mexico. An agriculture-based society, it enshrined its solar observations of the seasons in a circle of precisely arranged marker poles now dubbed “Woodhenge.” Their culture is known as Mississippian, and its most spectacular concentrations were in Southern Illinois. The Mississippian settlements were near rivers, including the greatest site across from St. Louis and the smaller but impressive Kincaid Mounds on the Ohio near its confluence with the Mississippi. Cahokia was well organized and accessible by waterway for much of the central and southeastern quadrants of the United States. Its people left artifacts of pottery, metalwork, and large-scale urban planning but few signs from which their experience could be inferred. Speculation therefore tends to pass itself off as knowledge.

We don’t know why they suddenly flowered, what they believed, or how they vanished. Archeology is an exact science in its recovery of physical remains; but it indulges speculative fantasies in interpreting them. At best, the literature on these builders and organizers admits its ignorance. At worst, it glosses over the dearth of evidence with speculation or with thick layers of conceptualization as in this attempt at assessing whether the communities were close-knit or loosely organized: “All this means that, in an important way, the tangible stages of the integrated↔bifurcated settlement articulation modal postural continuum that are identified with the Dual Complementary Heterarchical Community/Cult Sodality Heterarchy model are not structurally commensurable with the tangible hierarchical hamlet-village-nucleated town settlement articulation modal posture identified with the Community Polity model, particularly the egalitarian tribal and non-egalitarian chiefdom polity postures” (A. Martin Byers, The Real Mound Builders of North America: A Critical Realist Prehistory of the Eastern Woodlands, 200 BC-1450 AD, 2018, p. 135). This is guess-work decked out in formal attire. Even the soberly assessed physical evidence supports wildly deviant interpretations (George A. Milner, The Cahokia Chiefdom, 10-14). In matters where the physical evidence is most relevant, as in the attempts at estimating the population, the estimates can vary as much as 100 percent. Whatever the evidence, it should be possible to reflect on it in simpler and more accessible terms.

If there are no definitive answers, we might at least benefit from plainer questions. Publicists celebrate Cahokia’s size by comparing it to great cities. One anthropologist declares that only “racism” denies that Cahokia was the capital city of a civilization and that the mounds were indeed pyramids (Pauketat, Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians, 3). Could this impose a false perspective? Doesn’t the dominant Monks Mound with its radiating satellites of subordinate mounds contrast revealingly with the defensively walled cities of medieval Europe and the stockades and blockhouses of early pioneers? Doesn’t the contrast suggest that the Mounds culture faced with open arms the continental vastness that dismayed the European mind (and disoriented me as a child in the Midwest)? The unguarded sloping elevations of the mounds were not suitable for military purposes. Even the function of the stockade surrounding the supreme mound and its plaza probably wasn’t military. For defensive purposes, a stockade would have served better at the perimeter or crest. There is little evidence that the demise of Cahokia resulted from hostile onslaught. In this architectural openness, the Mississippians created the veritable antithesis of the medieval walled cities in which the inhabitants and their symbolic universes were enclosed and guarded physically as well as metaphysically. Medieval urban architecture was of a piece with medieval metaphysics. The promotion of a “great metropolis” distracts from what Cahokia appears to have been. Why is metropolitanism the criterion of human achievement? The Mounds architecture seems to have been an augmentation of the surrounding world rather than its exclusion or subjugation.

Inferences drawn from mute symbols and comparisons with cultures centuries later are unconvincing. If the somewhat irregular arrangement of the Cahokia settlement can be said to have symbolized the cosmos, this is because any village or town can be said to do the same. By existing in two dimensions, any place can symbolize the four directions; by existing in three the meeting place of heaven and earth. It is possible that “an avian-human figure with a beaked nose and wings” referred to the Sky World and that a “crosshatched design” referred to a serpent or alligator symbolizing the World of Earth and Water; but such assumptions ignore ambiguity, the vagaries of context, and a semantic shifting which can reverse or alter the significance of even more articulate written communications. With little to go on, the archeologists swell their accounts with personal experiences and recollections of the abuse and wanton wasting of sites by callous property owners, farmers, business operators, and state agencies. One reads more about the scientific archeologists of the twentieth century than about such nineteenth-century Schliemanns as John J.R. Patrick or the eccentric John Francis Snyder, who studied and endeavored to conserve the Cahokia site even as the mounds of “Mounds City” St. Louis were being systematically decimated. (See Biloine Whiting Young and Melvin L. Fowler, Cahokia: The Great Native American Metropolis [Urbana: U. of I., 2000], esp. 266-67, 27, 28). Professional archeologists are too dismissive of the inspirations of their amateur precursors.

One theory proposed by anthropologists does have an intuitive appeal: the artificial elevations enacted a restoration of dry land perennially inundated by life-sustaining waters. This inference assumes only that the mounds symbolized what they are: artificial elevations in a flood plain. The loose aggregation of the settlements and the earth out of which the monuments were constructed suggest a culture more at ease with transient nature, more willing to “go with the flow,” than the ancient Mesoamerican, Mideastern, or European cultures whose architectures were characterized by a masonry that bolstered them against the ravages of time, the incursions of aliens, and the formlessness of space. The durability of stone, like the commanding position of height, is a natural symbol of strength and power; but the architecture of the Cahokia people was of, and molded to, the earth, not towering toward heaven or inscribed in stone. This might suggest that their religion was not founded on some equivalent of the Rock of Ages. And if they didn’t see themselves as masters of eternity, would they have claimed to be divinely favored masters of this world? Should we be disappointed if they failed to achieve what some archeologists regard as a pinnacle of civilization embodied in their warring, human-sacrificing Mexican counterparts or in the imperialist glories of Europe and Asia?

Surely, they could have done it all differently. Sandstone and limestone would have been obtainable for quarrying and transport and adaptable to the craft skills of this disciplined and industrious people. The millions of hours invested in earthen monuments might have instead yielded stone temples, solid fortifications, and enduring walls. To postulate that those who built Cahokia were simply too primitive to do things our way is presumptuous and hardly a plausible answer to their mystery. What was the relationship of this agricultural people to the older and more widespread hunter-gatherer cultures? If their interactions were not hostile, did the Cahokia culture exert an attractive force upon neighboring tribes, the soft power of cultural influence? Was their sudden rise—what anthropologists call the “Big Bang” of the Cahokia community—a result of its openness and inclusiveness? Scientific investigations of skeletal remains indicate that as much as a third of those interred locally were born elsewhere. Did nonresidents arrive and do mound-building work in exchange for surplus corn? Did their toil convert surplus into visible prestige? Did the culture of inclusiveness and transaction shift to coercion through events such as the sacrifice of the victims whose remains were found in mound 72?

It seems likely that the aggregation expanded until its resources of wood, soil, and game were depleted and its attenuated social structures weakened. Did the sedentary urbanites assimilate to the culture which the recently arrived immigrants still retained within living memory? Did the urbanites join the newcomers in retreating back into the boundless wilderness? Did this happen suddenly, when political structures failed, or gradually, with minimal drama, as disgruntled parties of urbanites learned to hunt further afield until it became easier to consume their prey in the wilderness and their hunting camps became the norm? Was their regression facilitated by the provisional aspects of the Mississippian material and spiritual cultures? Is it easier to abandon less durable structures? Are those who live in stone houses, who heed strict hierarchies and adhere to deistic orthodoxies, inhibited from reverting to the adaptable life of foraging and animism? Weren’t the Israelites—spoiled as they were by servitude in the Egyptian breadbasket—reluctant to desert its managerial deities and return, guided only by their hidden god, to the desert in quest of the green pastures of their forebears? Did the spectacle of plenty hold them back or did the legend of their migratory origins spur them on to embrace uncertainty? Little Egypt! How many variations of your theme have played out in the land between the rivers!

Was the demise of the Cahokia culture comparable to the collapsed Norse polity of Greenland or the implosion of the stone-carving Easter Islanders? Does the dispersal of Cahokia and its Mississippian affiliates rank among the “Vanished Kingdoms” of Norman Davies, the unsustainable social-political structures we regard as failed states? Or was the Cahokians’ return to uncultivated nature a progressive adjustment and harbinger of the best-case scenario for our own future? A fortuitous strategic retreat? Without written records, we cannot know what they believed, but one does wonder whether the great agglomeration of mounds could have been understood by its inhabitants as a world perpetually subject to flux and flight. Was Cahokia a society mollified for extinction by its impermanence, something like a Burning Man of the pre-Columbian millenia—a tentatively enacted feint toward permanence, a camp which lingered for a few brief centuries before quietly passing the torch back to the free-ranging life of the wilderness? Did the Cahokia survivalists have the final say? Will our survivalists have the same?

When I arrive at the site on a Friday at noon just before the end of September, one school group and a few stray tourists are at the visitors’ center. Beds of prairie grass have been cultivated at the entrance. I chat with the attendants, tour the museum, and sit through the short explanatory film in the compact auditorium. At the end of the film, the sun sets. Campfires burn in the filmic panorama of the ancient city. As we linger in darkness, the screen is raised so that we glimpse behind it the museum exhibits and touring visitors, as if they and the exhibits were a conjured extension of the long-vanished city. I go outside into the warm sunshine and hike to the dominant Monk’s Mound. In the film, Monk’s Mound is bordered to the north by a navigable stream. I wonder if any port for shipping or storage facility for grain has ever been discovered. I haven’t read about any. Cahokia couldn’t have been such an active commercial center if its inhabitants had no shipping depots and only dugouts for transporting their produce abroad. It must have been rather a peaceful community, neither harried by commerce nor threatened by enemies at its gates. There evidently were no gates. But a culture can be undone by its inner worm as much as by its enemies without. Was their undoing their monoculturalist drive to supplant variety with quantity? Will it be ours? The wind is even stronger going up the stairs to the crest of Monk’s Mound. From up above, only a few of the subordinate mounds are visible. Two short sections of the stockade surrounding the great mound have been rebuilt. Looking west, you see in the distance the downtown skyline and arch of the city. In the foreground, you can see what looks like an echo of Monk’s Mound, an elongated artificial elevation with a second mound half visible behind it. Could these have been situated complementary to the great mound? On closer inspection, the raw upper slope of those heights give away their secret. They are landfills, our profane answer to the mountain-building of the ancient people. More than the forgotten mounds, what dismays me is our willingness to discard nature, culture, and history. William Cullen Bryant isn’t our most esteemed poet, but his romantic capacity for awe in sight of the wilderness and mounds says more to me than the hubris of the anthropologists.

As o’er the verdant waste I guide my steed,
Among the high rank grass that sweeps his sides
The hollow beating of his footsteps seems
A sacrilegious sound. I think of those
Upon whose rest he tramples. Are they here—
The dead of other days?—and did the dust
Of these fair solitudes once stir with life
And burn with passion? Let the mighty mounds
That overlook the rivers, or that rise
In the dim forest crowded with old oaks,
Answer.  A race, that long has passed away,
Built them;—a disciplined and populous race
Heaped, with long toil, the earth, while yet the Greek
Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms
Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock
The glittering Parthenon. These ample fields
Nourished their harvest, here their herds were fed,
When haply by their stalls the bison lowed,
And bowed his maned shoulder to the yoke.
All day this desert murmured with their toils,
Till twilight blushed, and lovers walked, and wooed
In a forgotten language, and old tunes,
From instruments of unremembered form,
Gave the soft winds a voice. The red man came—
The roaming hunter tribes, warlike and fierce,
And the mound-builders vanished from the earth.

Bryant got many things wrong: the dating of the Cahokia culture, its domestication of buffalo, and the destruction of the Mounds civilization through brutal conquest by the warlike “red man”; but his sense of wonder is easily overlooked. His wonder hints at the vulnerability of an ancient people of unknown identity. His awe adumbrates the indifference of deep time and space to our presumptive centrality on the cosmic stage. Unsolvable mysteries are as compelling as abstruse theories or tendentious scholarly virtue-signaling. The concluding museum exhibit invites visitors to reflect on the demise of an ancient culture. One could just as well prompt them to look west to those monuments to the decline of our own urban culture. Will our city dwellers be tempted to melt back into the less populated hinterland?

Academic anthropologists don’t earn their promotions by invoking the unknowability of the past. On the evidence of his verses, Bryant wasn’t the worst poet or least wise of observers. Why do we ignore him? Upbeat American culture has no ear for the sublime awe of European Romanticism or Pascal’s mystical self-annihilation in the face of the infinite void. Progress means breaking new ground. No one looks for meaning in the void surrounding us. Nothing means nothing to us. When Bryant guided his steed to this spot, his “verdant waste” was a living sea of grass. “High rank grass” swept the sides of his horse like ocean surf. Uncharted space was a terra incognita through which he haphazardly made his way. His verbal gesture is that of the mystic rather than the conqueror. Mirrored in a lost ancient polity, he recognizes our vulnerability, not our racial perfection or manifest destiny. It is possible that his ancient “race” lived more in harmony with the tides of an unbounded nature than we do. To us, the void is mainly what we reject. The white noise of the internet and the null plenitude of the landfill are monuments to the way we live and think now.

Earlier observers may have been racist in denying that indigenous peoples built the mounds and in denigrating their cultural complexity. But we have appropriated Native American culture. Our motives in claiming its metropolitan refinements are no less suspect. Since Cahokia now “belongs to us,” the more impressive the ancient city, the better for us as its owners and for the scholars who specialize in it. In The Pioneers, David McCullough recounts how early settlers in Ohio, finding similar mounds, integrated them into narratives of ancient or biblical history. Was their Eurocentrism more destructive than our repressive tolerance and academic appropriation? Some anthropologists evidently hope that the mounds builders not only saw themselves as the center of the world but exacted regular human sacrifices to bolster their centrality. Does it make sense to identify the Mounds people with later native Americans? Dissolving the distinction between Bryant’s ancient people and their descendants is like ignoring the difference between ancient Romans and medieval Italians: it’s unfair to both. Worse than racism or appropriation is indifference to the archeological remains and the questions they raise. Is it worse to relate the mounds to a single human narrative than to erect a garbage mountain next to a UNESCO world heritage site or build a career by one-sidedly over-promoting one’s specialty?

I wish I were a master of poetic collage who could juxtapose the scenarios I’m witnessing so that their similarities and differences would raise questions. I’ve seen prehistoric life carbonized in a coal mine. I’ve seen ancient habitats overshadowed by a garbage dump and by a declining metropolis in sight of both. Now I’m approaching a place that’s nearly a ghost town with its main drag running alongside a heavily barricaded river. The street I’m on dead-ends at the Ohio levee below the bridge to Kentucky: to the right the Marshall House with its modest design and second-floor portico, to the left the gap-toothed and mostly vacant street that was once a thriving commercial center. Here is the neo-classical temple of banking with its highwater mark recording the limit of the devastating flood of 1937. Here is the corner tavern with its bare brick interior, pool table, and crowded bar. I’m late and relieved to find Christy and Wayne waiting patiently for me. When we met in August, I had the feeling that we would share interests and sympathies.

Some respect is due the early amateur archeologists who studied the remains of the past at Cahokia: John Patrick or John Francis Snyder. Like the amateur discoverer of ancient Troy, our Midwestern Schliemanns made mistakes; but their curiosity and speculation helped preserve more of the mounds. Otherwise, less would have been salvaged of the Southern Illinois past. Respect is due the volunteer preservationists. Arriving at Nate’s in Old Shawneetown, I explain to Christy and Wayne my plans for interviewing people. They tell me how they ended up here; how they met in Bakersfield, California, and moved when Wayne got a job driving coal trucks. They are hard-toiling, independent-minded people with a selfless interest in historical conservation. As preservationists, they don’t cop antiques or expect pay for their work. If what they’re doing isn’t idealism, I don’t know what it would look like. In August, they showed me the historical sites of Old Shawneetown. Christy introduced me to Joe Patrick who took me on my moonless night tour of Gallatin and Hardin Counties. Joe had intended to be here today, but his crops were just right for harvesting and crops can’t wait.

Wayne is good natured, bright when coaxed into the conversation, but more inclined to listen and let Christy tell the story. As in any good detective story, there are two plot lines, one the zigzagging path of an unsettled life; the other Christy’s search for her family roots. Her written account outlines two plots for posterity. First came the launch of a typical American pinball trajectory through life: “I was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1956 . . . Mom and Dad left St. Louis while we were babies and traveled southeast and then west. We lived in Georgia, Oklahoma, and Texas eventually settling in Phoenix, Arizona.” Growing up was not unpleasant. “My brother and I had a good childhood, loving parents and close neighbors, one neighbor we even called Grandma, although she wasn’t a blood relative. . . . Sometimes love is thicker than blood.” Later she begins her search for origins: “’Where did this all start?’ That was the question I asked myself as I sat down at our dining room table looking at all the old photos resting there just waiting for their stories to be revealed. . . . I was pretty sure I knew where I came from but the bigger question was ‘Where did my family lineage begin?’”

Since Christy enjoys telling her own story, I won’t anticipate much of it here. Her five-year search for her roots is partly successful when she finds information and obtains a photo negative of her maternal grandmother Martha and locates relatives in Augusta County, Virginia. She begins and ends with the same recognition: “One thing I have learned over the years is that family isn’t always blood; it’s the people in your life that want you in theirs; the ones who accept you for who you are and love you anyway, whether they are two-legged or four-legged. I have a larger sense of self and belonging now—a bigger picture of family. And so here it is five years later, and I am again putting my discoveries, adventures and memories on paper, it seems the natural thing to do.” A sense of self and belonging: could this be the submerged anchor of political as well as personal loyalties for many of us?

I recognize from her account that her search for her family origins is of a piece with her putting down roots in Shawneetown; and that her reconstruction of her family chronicle matches her endeavors of preserving the architectural heritage through active engagement with the Gallatin County Historical Society. Christy has performed ably in jobs ranging from waitressing to legal discovery in the case of a Superfund Site Contamination to tutoring at local schools. She likes to get things done and enjoys contacts with tourists, of whom there are sometimes dozens from as far away as Norway visiting the historical sites of her adopted home. When they first moved here and noticed trash everywhere, their sense of ecological responsibility merged with the cause of preservation. The town was burning nearly all its refuse. Christy pushed for a recycling ordinance, successfully. She was motivated by a sensibility she brought with her from the West Coast. “Living in Washington state opened our eyes to the need to take better care of the planet.” She was soon invited to join the Historical Society.

Christy and Wayne are exemplars of the intelligent and proactive environmentally responsible citizen, the kind that academics expect to see sipping lattes and supporting political candidates on the Left. But Christy tells me that in the course of her life she has transitioned from Democrat to Independent to Republican. I show them a David Brooks editorial with an imagined conversation between a pro-Trump “Flyover Man” and an anti-Trump “Urban Guy.” “Urban Guy” thunders for impeachment. “Flyover Man” replies that, “[Trump] was the only one who saw us. He was the only one who saw that the America we love is being transformed before our eyes.” “Flyover Man” says to “Urban Guy”: “If people like you are unable to acknowledge my dignity and see my problems, I’ll stay with Trump.” Christy says that this is “spot on” for her and Wayne. The two, like “Flyover Man,” are not naïve about the shortcomings of Trump or for that matter the shortcomings of private insurance companies or corporate capital. Assuming that they do recognize the evils of the system and do feel deeply that the planet needs saving, how much greater must the weight of their contempt be for the Democrats whom they see as agents of irresponsible change and detractors of people like them, as Brooks put it: “If people like you are unable to acknowledge my dignity and see my problems, I’ll stay with Trump.”

But how can their ecological conscience be squared with Trump’s abrogation of the Paris Accords or with his pressure on California to abandon its emissions standards? Again, I sense the consternation I felt at the Wabash River demonstration of anti-pollution equipment by the Carmi firm of Elastec. I took part in activities seemingly in the spirit of the Green New Deal, yet participants were convinced, in Elastec’s case, that regulating oil drilling was a threat to the firm’s business plan. One participant complained, “Everyone always blames oil.” He was worried about his job security; but why emphasize this “blaming”? Honor and shame may be underestimated factors in generating rural resentment. They may even weigh more than envy or ignorance. Christy and Wayne are neither ignorant of the problems of society nor envious of those better off. Honor and shame correlate with personal loyalty and family lineage, matters of the utmost importance to Christy. Honor and shame have less relation to income disparity or availability of health insurance (though Christy says she is “winging it” without coverage and knows that her situation is precarious). She might not use the word; but for her, tracing her family lineage, maintaining loyalty to her adopted family, and conserving the historical profile of her adopted home are a matter of self-respect and therefore of a kind of “honor.”

After lunch and a tour of a recently refurbished nearby Catholic church, I promise to come back and meet with them and my other acquaintances. Then I set off toward Carbondale in the hope of finding traces of a man who might have insider knowledge of the recent history of Cairo, that most troubled and afflicted place in all Little Egypt. The cultivated bottom lands are lush and ripe with crops beneath a perfect sky. The wooded outcroppings of the Shawnee Hills are dark green islands in the fertile sea. The landscape has the charm of an archipelago of forested hillocks amid tranquilly rolling fields. I’ve had a pleasant trip and look forward to seeing Christy and Wayne again sometime soon.

My return to Cairo requires careful planning so that I won’t flee the city again in another anxiety attack. First, I drive to Carbondale to my old haunts to ferret out contacts that might provide an insider view of the events and developments, both former and recent, in Cairo. Though unsuccessful, I make the acquaintance of Alan Dillard, a graduate of SIU of roughly my generation, originally from tiny Ridgway in rural Gallatin County. Alan is a quintessential Southern Illinois success story who has made a career of social work and wine culture while pursuing avocations from guitar-making to kayaking. Like me, he entered SIU in the mid-Sixties and studied literature and philosophy, became politically engaged, and was thrown off track by the Vietnam-era draft; but (unlike me) he came back to Carbondale in 1979 and made a career in social work, combined with commercial wine-making and viticulture. More than me, Alan represents the old regional centrality of the university in serving rural Southern Illinois and in seeing this service pay off through the creative and productive value added of its graduates. He is a congenial, happy man, known among the local bar crowd. He loves travel and speaks fondly of his daughters and his wife of many years. We have a good conversation and promise to stay in touch.

I decide to give up my research for the weekend and go home before it’s too late to stay awake and drive. Back in Bloomington, I continue my online and library research. I’m teaching as an adjunct at Illinois Wesleyan University. Since I have to undergo minor surgery for a minute skin cancer on my nose and the procedure makes me reluctant to show my face for a while, I shift to searching for books about the river towns of Shawneetown and Cairo. More is available on the latter than the former, but for both I find material that makes my anxiety attack seem clairvoyant. Shawneetown is near where I grew up. It had the reputation of a wide-open river town. We would sneak down for the bar scene and laissez faire spirit. I find library sources that evoke the legendary ambience of the old river towns in their waning days, when river commerce was already being replaced by the railways and highways, but their free-wheeling culture lingered on. The sources also evoke what grew out of this culture: the wanderlust inspired by the shrill of riverboat whistles, the rumble of boxcars, and the freedom of the wide-open road, the romantically wayward life of hobos and hitchhikers. My youth coincided with the sentimental late-romantic phase of that culture. Like others of my generation, I participated in it by hitchhiking, but not by hopping trains. My sources summon up the images of a forgotten culture like shimmering reflections in an evaporating stream. But what I can now see beneath the surface of those hobo-hitchhiker idylls of rambling and living off one’s luck is an undertow of nightmarish violence.

Under the heading of Shawneetown, Illinois, I chance upon an author who is a discovery: Rudy Phillips or “Rambling Rudy,” “King of the Hobos,” a man who settled in Shawneetown after riding the rails for seven years from age fourteen to twenty-one during the mid-1920s to early 1930s. With a decent editor, a subtler title, and a cooler moniker, Phillips’ book could have held its own with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Both are distant descendants of Walt Whitman’s ecstatic love of the American landmass and its sundry masses: Rudy Phillips, the uneducated love child of Whitman’s mystical union; Kerouac its self-conscious reenactor; Rudy, the compulsively driven, unwitting heir to Whitman’s frenzies; Jack, their sentimental esthete and dreamer-dabbler whose true passion is self-love and whose art is stylized self-presentation. Jack belabors his nonchalance. Rudy is frank about the motive of his youthful hobo wanderings. He was lazy and didn’t want to work. He sought adventure by riding the rails, living off his wits, and begging at backdoors and street corners. Since he is less self-stylizing than Kerouac—or does so frankly and naively without Kerouac’s bohemian pretensions and worshipful idolization of eccentric heroes—Rudy can register the downtrodden rabble in scenarios worthy of Chaplin’s Modern Times. Arrested and brought before a judge with his fellow hobos in Los Angeles, Rudy paints this moving frieze of how the poor are degraded to a driven mass and factored through proceedings that combine the sanctity of the church with the rhythm of the assembly line:

Early the next morning a majority of the people, Rudy included, were called out, lined up once again and marched to the court room for sentencing. Out of the distinguished chambers came the omnipotent image of a black robed deity; the presiding judge, who alighted on the towering bench of justice. A hush swept through the court as his honor raised an ominous dark stained gavel high above his eminent being. His awe-struck subjects stood in reverent silence awaiting the fatal first chord heralding in the ritual of jurisprudence. Down came the sacred mallet and the multitude began to sway to the overpowering rhythm of due process. (Hobo King Rambling Rudy: Great Depression Hobo 1925 to 1932. Evansville. p. 30)

Rudy is no bleeding-heart reformer. When he passes time in Pershing Square, “sitting around listening to soap-box speeches by other misfits and part-time rabble rousers,” he concedes that “most of the time he had no inkling whatsoever of what they were talking about” (184). Nonetheless, he observes with the utmost clarity not only the brutal oppression of the hobos who are sadistically abused, but the far crueler, murderous mistreatment of non-white indigents. Riding a southbound train through Cairo and Memphis, he and four black boys get trapped atop a coal car by a vicious giant of a fireman.

“Git outta here you filthy niggers!” The fireman was screaming at the top of his lungs as he crawled over the coal chute. . . . All four of the boys jumped up and ran for the ladder, amidst a deadly hail of coal. They were crying out and begging for mercy as the lumps pounded their soft flesh. The fireman was unrelenting in his pursuit of the violator.

Rudy watched with penetrating horror as one by one, the boys fell or jumped from the crowded ladder, to what had to be a certain death (100-101).

Rudy expects to be next in line to be hurled to his death, but the fireman then notices his skin color: “The hatred vanished from his eyes. ‘You can stay on this here train if’n you want to’” (102). Rudy was friendly enough with his black traveling companions to feel their terror and hate their tormentors, but he can’t but be relieved when white bullies spare him as neither black nor Mexican. The thought of reporting those child murders to the police never crosses his mind. Would it have done any good?

Rudy’s life as a hobo lays an instructive foundation for Rudy’s Life in Shawneetown, 1928-1980 (Copyright Rudy Phillips, 1980). He settles there in the footsteps of his parents after calling it quits as a rootless itinerant. Since the Shawneetown of his day is still a wide-open river town, he enjoys his free and fun-loving lifestyle while gradually establishing himself as the owner of a concession stand and barbeque restaurant and a colorful fixture of the community. His town has the “bad, ugly reputation” (19) that enticed us there when I was growing up in neighboring White County. We thought of it as a rough place where you only went in force. Only now, reading Rudy’s memoir, do I realize that the danger we sensed in the predominantly white river town drew upon a deeper rift of social stratification.

I remember that since my hometown was nearly all white, the poorer end of our town and the poorest farm boys from the countryside effectively took the place of a racial minority: the school principal and police targeted those tough and feared kids with preemptive violence. I remember how the principal of our junior high school dragged one of those tough, defiant boys into his office and beat him with a wooden paddle until it shattered. Hobos in Rudy’s account are intruders and interlopers. As such, they could meet with the brutal treatment once visited on runaway slaves. Rudy describes the savagery with which he and other mainly white hobos were bull-whipped through the streets of an Arkansas town (143-53). But non-white indigents fared far worse. Rudy’s ability to avoid their lot and appeal to housewives and benefactors as a poor boy of good breeding was enhanced by his race. The violence meted out to the disreputable like the generosity granted to the deserving poor spanned the color line. Yet racism both apportioned the violence and intensified and perpetuated it across the pecking order. If there were no non-whites, a lower, disreputable class of Caucasians had to take their place. We knew who they were in Carmi. Someone had to be on bottom. The poor white residents of “Mickville” were beyond the pale. Group solidarity coincided with outgroup violence against outsiders and underdogs.

Conversely, the flood of 1964 erased our social differences by forcing even the residents of wealthier neighborhoods to be ferried to their homes. We were briefly, almost literally, all in the same boat. Resistance to the violence of nature cements group solidarity. Rudy describes the spirit of cooperation and generosity during the flood of 1937 that swept Shawneetown, carrying off houses and persuading citizens to rebuild on higher ground (24-32). I wonder, could that shift to higher ground have entailed the same impulse that led the people of ancient Cahokia to focus their culture on the construction of mounds? Are social order and group cooperation instinctive responses to the unpredictable violence of nature? Did those preemptive impulses elevate corn production and extend Cahokia’s influence? More mysteriously: Is there something destructive at the heart of our impulse to build and expand? The true sphinx of Little Egypt is the paradox by which forces within human nature swell up to destroy a society organized to resist and subjugate the outer forces of nature—like a siege garrison turning its defensive ferocity on itself. After conquering the land and barricading the rivers, our drive to dominate turns upon itself. We clear and cultivate the land, expel its free-ranging inhabitants, exclude or oppress interlopers, and fortify river banks to hold the floods at bay. The drive to subjugate nature then turns on itself. Nature makes us tools of its revenge against its conquerors: us against us. Look at the land we’ve defaced with strip mining, oil drilling, and commercial development. We’ve dug our own graves.

The sphinx of self-destruction is embodied in the tragic story of Cairo, Illinois. The city was founded in the early nineteenth century on a wilderness-conquering get-rich scheme that suckered even Charles Dickens, who took his revenge in literature. Despite Cairo’s Copperhead leanings, it remained loyal to and served the Union during the Civil War. After the war, the city flourished as a port for river traffic. Transit passengers and rivermen turned it into a raucous Babylon, fondly remembered by some long after its decline (see Larry Reid, River City: A Home-Town Remembrance of Cairo, Illinois. New York: Exposition Press, 1966). The decline was slow and probably inevitable. In the 1937 flood that forced Shawneetown to move to higher ground, the Cairoites’ desperate sandbagging saved their city; but the city that had resisted the tides of war and flooding had lost its way and would spiral into decline.

As with Williamson, something can be learned by studying the earlier, less professional histories. Even their factually questionable myth-making is instructive. This is true of H.C. Bradsby’s History of Cairo. Part I, in History of Alexander, Union and Pulaski Counties, ed. by William Henry Perrin (Chicago: Baskin & Co., 1883). Like Milo Erwin, Bradsby is motivated by local patriotism to create a foundational myth for his area; however, he looks more to technical progress than to the civilizing thrust of the simplified religion of the founders. Cairo’s prospects were bets placed on a technology-driven commerce and progress. Bradsby does retain subliminal teleological and soteriological motifs. “Many thousands of years ago, preparations first began to be made for habitation for man upon the very spot now occupied by the city of Cairo” (12). Geological history is thought to have served manifest destiny. The opposite was true. The low-lying spit of land between the two great rivers was singularly unsuited for permanent habitation. Only a concerted profit-seeking promotion by investors convinced settlers to build and build again as often as nature rebuffed their initiatives. Bradsby recounts the brutal siege of Fort Jefferson by British-allied Shawnee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw Indians in 1781 and its stubborn defense as a Christ-like act of sacrifice: “let [us] recall the heroic efforts of those, not only who died that we might live, but of those who so heroically struggled to drive back the red fiends” (13). The fierce but marginal events at Fort Jefferson in George Rogers Clark’s wilderness front campaigns against the British headquartered at Detroit hold for Bradsby the heroic weight of “Thermopylae” in withstanding “the murderous midnight attack of the bloody, yelling fiends” (15).

Especially memorable are Bradsby’s reflections on the New Madrid earthquake at the turn of 1811/12. In his account, this shattering disturbance of the Mississippi Valley, centered not far from Cairo, was experienced by residents and travelers as a cataclysmic upheaval which coincided with the introduction of steamboat travel on the Ohio and Mississippi. Many blamed the quake and flood on the unnatural disturbance of nature of a locomotion powered by boiling water. For Bradsby, however, the genius of human progress triumphs over superstitious bigotry and indeed passive nature itself:

In a little while, only the traces of the great earthquake, even, can be found and pointed out, while the steam engine has been the first, the great power that has done more for civilization and human advancement in the past fifty years than all else combined. From this one feeble, imperfect boat has come the world’s Armada, that now plows the waves of every river and sea, until the busy world upon the waters and its wealth of nations almost equals that of land. It is ever present—ever living—ever growing in might, power and the welfare of the whole human family. (19)

But not quite the whole human family. Equally notable is the significance attached by Bradsby to one remarkable incident: the single-handed rebellion of the black proprietor of a wharf-boat hotel at Cairo, Joseph Spencer. In 1851, evidently in consequence of some legal dispute with a challenger, Spencer entered the Justice’s office on the first floor of the Cairo Hotel. Instead of submitting to the legal proceedings, he stuck a pistol into a powder keg and dictated his terms to the officers of the law under threat of blowing up the establishment. He then flees to his wharf-boat and offers armed resistance to his besiegers for an extended period. His boat is towed to mid-stream and set on fire while Spencer continues his armed resistance. He leaps into the river and does not come up again, but, fantastically, Bradsby manages to associate this rebellion with the imminent civil war and plague of negro invasion from the South, a mirror-like inversion of the actual rebellion (50-53). Through guilt by association the author makes another antebellum black man in Cairo, the avowedly pious and gentle “Old Rube,” nothing less than “the innocent advance guard of the whole ‘coon’ tribe, that have since been inflicted upon Cairo” (56). Among the amusing quirks of this polite and industrious old Cairoite is his favoring over all other biblical narratives “the story of Jonah and the whale, and Noah and his ark” (56). As a “holy fool” and prophet without honor in his homeland, Old Rube identified with Jonah in the belly of the monster and recognized in the Flood an omen that his fellow Cairoites overlooked.

Little Egypt and Cairo in particular were formed on the one hand by an entitled faith in providence or progress and, on the other, by perpetual threats from demonic, death-dealing powers of disorder, of flood and savagery, murder and mayhem. Agents of demonic disorder, whether the resisting Native Americans or rebelling African Americans, were stripped of all human dignity and treated much like “terrorism” in the wake of 9/11. During his otherwise largely bloodless victory at Vincennes, George Rogers Clark had four captured pro-British Indian marauders brutally “axed” in plain sight of the besieged British fort and proceeded, blood-splattered, to meet with the British commander Hamilton. (See Dale Van Every, “George Rogers Clark in Kentucky and the Illinois Country, 1772-1778,” in David Curtis Skaggs (ed. and intro.), The Old Northwest in the American Revolution: An Anthology (Madison: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1977), p. 191.)The rampage of Joseph Spencer, who may have been barred from receiving justice, is depicted in the dire colors of a terrorist assault. Meanwhile, the combined threats of miscalculated progress and underestimated nature visit one catastrophe after another upon the city: the collapse of the Cairo City and Canal Company devastates the population in 1841, the levee-breaching flood in 1858. The people of Cairo learn to expect salvation from outside, whether from the transformations wrought by outside investment, the required levee construction by the Illinois Central Railroad, or the inpouring of troops and resources during the Civil War. (See Christopher K. Hayes, Way Down in Egypt Land: Conflict and Community in Cairo, Illinois, 1850-1930 [University of Missouri, Columbia. Ph.D. diss., 1996]; Herman R. Lantz, A Community in Search of Itself: A Case History of Cairo, Illinoi [Carbondale: SIU Press, 1972]; Charles E. Koen, My Story of the Cairo Struggle [Union Graduate School, 1980]).

When the Cairo black population skyrockets during the Civil War, as Union steamboats deposit fleeing slaves classified as “contraband” in the garrisoned city, the new arrivals have no choice but to look to the Freedmen’s Bureau for sustenance and protection. In the later nineteenth century, the city which always expects its salvation to come from elsewhere never attains its sense of predestined importance; but comparatively speaking, the black population enjoys modest advantages. Cairo is never a sundown city barring black settlement. There are some black city officials and black organizations and rudiments of a black middle class. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, modest progress comes up against violent resistance. The otherwise stagnating city has a thriving “sin” economy of liquor and prostitution in which otherwise unemployable black folk can find a niche and enjoy an illicit latitude. Respectable white Cairoites associate blacks with sin, corruption, and, worst of all, miscegenation and the endangerment of white womanhood. This mood turns violent in the massive lynching riot of 1909, which is followed by general setbacks for the black population. These events—the general decline of the city as a whole, and the rise of a black power movement in the 1960s and 70s—are documented in scholarly books and a recent documentary film. (See John A. Beadles, Stained with Blood and Tears: Lynchings, Murder, and Mob Violence in Cairo, Illinois, 1909-1910. [Saluki Publishing], 1-13.) Cairo has become a symbolic embodiment of the depredations of racism: a city that died of racism. With some justification, its citizens resent this role. Equally vicious race riots took place in Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois, or Tulsa, Oklahoma, not to mention the infamous draft riots in New York City during the Civil War, a city probably still more segregated today than godforsaken Cairo. Since racism coincided with the decline of the dwindling Illinois river town, it is easier to turn its losers into a moral exemplum. This moral judgment rings off key considering the resemblance of the black “contraband” unloaded on the Cairo levee during the Civil War to today’s asylum seekers on our southern border.

The story told about Cairo is a lot like those trick drawings that hide their true object in plain sight. They say that during and after the Civil War, Cairo was flooded with black refugees from the South, outsiders who overwhelmed the city. But why were they foreign refugees? Why was it that the towns to the north only absorbed white refugees fleeing the war-torn southern states? They say that after the Second World War the city was again inundated with black immigrants who fled the South for the more generous welfare benefits of Illinois. But what made them outsiders? What conditions were they fleeing? If the problem lay with black immigrants, why did white Cairo treat long-term black residents the same as the arrivals, excluding them equally from middle-class employment, from the white school system, the public library, and the swimming pool, which white Cairoites closed and destroyed so that it couldn’t be integrated? They say that outside troublemakers fomented race riots and the firebombing of white businesses. But why did the Klan-like organization of the “White Hats” surround and fire into black housing developments at night? What about those white business owners who refused fair treatment to black applicants and customers, preferring bankruptcy to evenhandedness, the owners whose businesses burned during the city’s troubles? Wouldn’t they have known that their decline was presaged in their balance sheets, that their best prospect lay in collecting their fire insurance, blaming their losses on black terrorists, and leaving for other parts. Nothing grates on black chroniclers of the city’s decline more than the claim that it was destroyed by troublemaking black nationalists and outside agitators. Plenty of evidence suggests that it was undermined by general circumstances—and by itself.

I can’t help seeing these events through the lens of my life-long preoccupation with postwar Germany. I spent years as a student, researcher, and visiting professor in Germany and Austria. Those years included the late 1960s and early 1970s, when most of the population had lived either during the Nazi era or with an older generation that had. As a scholar of German Studies, I followed the slow process of coming to terms with the past. That experience shaped my perspective on the history of my own country. As a student of German affairs, I came to several insights. First, there truly are two sides to every conflict. For example, the Allies did carry out terror bombings of German cities, killing civilians indiscriminately, with little effect of ending or shortening the war. Second, even though all conflicts are two-sided, this does not mean that all sides are equal or that conflicts have no perpetrators. Despite what can be said in sympathy with Germans, there is no doubt about Hitler’s aggression or the Nazis’ persecution of Jews, no more than we can doubt that the troubles of black Americans began with their enslavement and discrimination. Third, unconditional acknowledgment of the truth is essential to the moral transformation of individuals or nations. We know this perfectly well on a common-sense basis. A murderer isn’t exonerated by alleging that his victim was also flawed. The criminal who refuses to admit guilt is unworthy of clemency. Finally, it must be said that those who set themselves up as judges and recognize only the unqualified contrast of good and evil can be and often are morally self-serving.

My German experience gave me a wary respect for the complex process of coming to terms with the past. I was impressed by Viktor Klemperer’s diaries of a Jewish citizen of Nazi Germany: they offered a closer, more nuanced look at how Germans reacted to Jews persecuted in their midst. Klemperer’s diaries undermine our received notions of generic suffering versus collective evil. I was curious about white reactions to racial conflicts in Cairo, not least because I resist the good-versus-evil scenarios into which accounts of the city are sometimes cast, so I wrote to a key white witness. The Baptist minister Larry Potts was a determined spokesman for segregation in Cairo. He helped initiate the private high school, Camelot Academy, founded so that the city’s white youth would not have to sit next to black students in classrooms. Notoriously, Rev. Potts is mentioned in documents as having bludgeoned to death a 73-year old black man who, the pastor claimed, was sexually assaulting Mrs. Potts and could only be restrained by means of a lethal blow administered to the head with a baseball bat.

After doing an online search and learning that Rev. Potts is still active in the community as the minister of the Mighty Rivers Regional Worship Center and Baptist Church in Cairo, and has been featured in a television newscast as an “everyday hero,” I sought an interview with him with the following inquiry:

October 11, 2019

Dear Reverend Potts,

If I may introduce myself, I am a 72-year old professor of German language and literature who grew up in Carmi (White County) and is taking advantage of retirement to travel and write about his native Southern Illinois. Of course, no study of Little Egypt can be complete if it doesn’t include Cairo. I have read books and articles about the history and troubles of your city; but I feel that I must talk to the Cairoites themselves, young or old, poor or prosperous, black as well as white.

My interest is that of a Southern Illinoisan coming home to reconsider his region in the light of a lifetime of learning. Although my field of research was German literature in the age of Luther, I learned perhaps more by traveling, studying, and living in Germany in the half-century after the Second World War. The story of post-war Germany is a remarkable tale of national redemption brought about when the Germans took unconditional responsibility for the wrongs committed in the past, wrongs committed with the passive or active collusion of the German people.

I have always refused to sit in judgment of the German people. How can we know what we would have done in their place? Judge not, lest we be judged. Nonetheless, the transformation of German society through the unconditional acceptance of responsibility for past wrongs is of profound interest to any student of human character. For the same reason of interest in human character, I would like to know how the people of Cairo have come to terms with their troubled past. The best way to do this is by meeting and speaking with Cairoites.

The questions I ask everywhere in Southern Illinois are these. Is “Egypt” a region unto itself? If so, what sets us apart? What are the main local concerns? What has happened to change people’s basic views? The last question interests me above all for Cairo, and so I would like to put that question to you. How, if at all, have your views evolved? What has happened in your lifetime, or what have you experienced and learned in recent years, that changed your outlook?

I would be most grateful, Rev. Potts, if you would give some thought to my questions and in the near future allow me to interview you about your life and opinions. If it isn’t too much to ask, a written reply would be welcome too; however, an interview can offer more depth.

Respectfully, Dr. Andrew Weeks, Prof. emer. of German, Illinois State University

I immediately received the following email reply:

Dr. Weeks, I am in receipt of your letter dated October 11, 2019, regarding your interview request.

I must decline the invitation to participate in your study.

Sincerely,

Larry Potts

My research on Cairo therefore relies on published materials. Fortunately, they are available in abundance. They tell a tale of a speculating, inconstant, passive population united mainly by race identification and a sense of entitlement.

In late October, I drive down to Southern Illinois again to visit Southeastern Illinois College (SIC) outside Harrisburg and then from there to Carbondale where I look for contacts in order to get information on Cairo and the Union County Hispanics. On Friday afternoon, I have an appointment with a man who will show me around the college that I’ve passed several times and admired for its quasi-Benedictine hilltop location. The man I meet in the president’s office is Archie Blair. Archie is from Harrisburg. He began his studies at SIC when it had just been relocated from the Harrisburg High School to its present site. After taking his degree at SIU Carbondale, he returned for a long, successful career, teaching English rhetoric and literature and serving in various capacities in the college administration.

After driving through some dreary, lifeless areas, SIC is an oasis of liveliness and instruction. We tour well-equipped classrooms, the art studios and gallery, the theater, the library which is currently being remodeled, the tutoring center annex, the exercise room and basketball court, a coffeeshop, bookstore, and the lab daycare center. Everywhere in the interconnected spaces, there is a sense of alert, purposeful activity. If community colleges suffer from association with high schools, conformism isn’t oppressive here. SIC has neither the regimentation of the high school nor the anonymity of the large university. The students and staff seem devoted to their institution. Archie is apparently known to all and liked by everyone. I recognize in this astute and conscientious educator an alternative track to what I’ve come to regard as the all-pervasive social climbing of academia, whereby we measure our worth by the eminence of the institution, the level of instruction imparted, and the peer evaluation of research performed or published. Physicians aren’t free of social climbing either, but they are more likely to measure their merits in terms of healing those hardest to heal. How many academics measure their worth in terms of educating those most challenged and in need of enlightenment? That’s what we call remedial education, and we consign it to the community college.

I spend the night in Carbondale. It’s a rainy, chilly weekend. Next morning, I meet with my friend, the former chancellor, in a shopping center. We exchange views about education and administration. He is in general agreement about how social climbing affects administration. Administrators become specialized. They identify with a career more than with an institution and think mainly about their professional advancement. I had asked the acting SIU chancellor if I might “embed” with a freshman group to study how new students do or do not become integrated into the student body. From the struggling academic unit in which I made my career I acquired experience with recruitment and retention which are major concerns in Carbondale. Though any advice I might offer would be free of charge and could be rejected or ignored, my offer predictably received no response. The reason is obvious. An administrator who secures authorization to fund so-called expert advice has greater control over its dissemination in order to forestall criticism. More importantly, even if the advice is worthless, the administrator can cite its resource-heavy procurement as his having “made recruitment and retention a priority.” That’s what matters for climbing to the next rung of the administrative career ladder. It’s about plus points on a resume. Quarterly stockholder dividends induce corporations to think in short terms. Administrative career mobility does the same for academic institutions.

In the afternoon, I drive through a mild rain on largely empty highways and roads to Kaskaskia and St. Genevieve where there are some preserved remnants of the French settlements along the Mississippi. Because of the mud and rain, I stay in my car most of the time. I drive up and down streets and peer into the houses from the outside. The French habitants, like the Hispanic population of California, greeted the arrival of the English-speaking Americans, but were soon cheated and bullied into flight. Now their alleged architectural remnants are tourist attractions. We’ve imposed an overwhelming cultural homogeneity in this country which makes historical complexity a precious commodity, but one that we only know to package in the most generic, quantified six-flags-over-Texas variety. I drive by the stately, porticoed house of Pierre Menard and past the Menard State Prison presumably named in his honor. I drive through the battened down streets of Chester and back around the curved edge of the bottom land where lush fields extend to one side and the scattered houses vis-à-vis hug the rim of the bluffs and rises where the floodplain ends. It’s a gloomy, rainy day, yet every window is empty and dark. No one is outside. Is anyone inside? It feels like the old Twilight Zone episode where every human being vanishes mysteriously into thin air. All but one. Why is every window dark? The inhabitants must be absorbed in their screens or handheld devices.

Looking at this pleasant, unspectacular terrain, I wonder why Chekhov’s equally unspectacular Russian landscapes have so much more symbolic intensity: “At first the weather was fine and still…. But when it began to get dark in the forest a cold, penetrating wind blew inappropriately from the east and everything sank into silence. Needles of ice stretched across the pools, and it felt cheerless, remote, and lonely in the forest. There was a whiff of winter.” (“The Student”). Every element in his snapshot can be found here, yet our landscapes are inert and meaningless. Again Chekhov: “I was standing on the bank of the Goltva, waiting for the ferry-boat from the other side…. The weather seemed to me magnificent. It was dark, yet I could see the trees, the water and the people…. The world was lighted by the stars, which were scattered thickly all over the sky. I don’t remember seeing so many stars” (“Easter Eve”). I am reminded of the brilliant sky over Hardin County last August. Except for the old ferry-boat and star-illumined sky, what is there that we don’t have in plenty? Chekhov’s descriptions extract the symbolic intensity of nature. Try doing the same here, and it would seem contrived. One reason is that his observers were closer to nature. Their starry sky is brighter, their roads are poorer, their transport more improvised, their nature harder to ignore. We can blot out nature, cordon it off with asphalt thoroughfares, lock it out of our insulated houses, flee from it into the ethereal labyrinth of the internet. Russian nature is the face of a universe which the sensitive soul queries for traces of human warmth and meaning. Its infinite variety embodies the qualities of individualism and naturalness which the great Russian authors prize above all. I suppose that we are confronted after all with its equivalent. What else do the arrangement and style of the random houses and invariant fields express but the two dominant chords of our own culture: individualism and conformity. Each to his own—but none out of line. One old frame house with a wraith of smoke rising from its chimney reminds me of Brecht’s poem:

Smoke

The little house under the trees by the lake:
From its roof rises smoke.
Without that
How inconsolable would be
House, trees, and lake.

Only the implicit human reference point gives the landscape meaning. What I’m missing and looking for with too little success is human contact, the kind that I enjoyed as an Uber driver in Carbondale last summer. All fall, I’ve been restricted not only by my family’s needs but by my temporary teaching as an adjunct at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington. The first thing I do when the semester is over is drive south again. This time I will be more successful.

4. The Diaspora of Light

Are we not every bit as much a cosmos as the starry heavens, a cosmos which we should know better and be better able to comprehend than the one up above?
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, “An Entire Milky Way of Thoughts,” Aphorisms.

After completing my duties at Wesleyan and hosting a party for my friend Jim van der Laan who recently moved to Michigan but returned to visit, I am ready on December 12 to resume my research in Southern Illinois. Driving south early on Thursday morning, my first stops are in Benton and West Frankfort. In Benton, I tour the museum built into the old jailhouse where the gangsters and bootleggers of the 1920s were held. Gangster lore and the Beatles’ George Harrison (who visited his sister here in 1963 and performed for the first time in America) are the main attractions advertised for this former mining town. I remember that last summer I stopped at a nearby service station. An older woman with a perfectly preserved English accent asked for my help filling a gas canister for her lawnmower. We chatted and she turned out to be an army bride who had spent her entire adult life here without ever becoming un-British, but with a sad awareness of the local decline. I ask in the jail museum if this could have been Harrison’s sister but am told that the sister has long since moved elsewhere.

A little before 12:30 when I’m scheduled to meet for lunch with United Mine Workers officers and retired miners, I find my way to Bonnie’s, just off the I-57 exit to West Frankfort. I can’t help anticipating what I expect to hear: a paean to coal and Trump, disdain for climate science, and a projected glowing outlook for the industry, if only it could receive the proper protection. My surprise could not be more complete. When the three enter the restaurant, I know right away that it’s them. They remind me of my brother and his colleagues. They are retired from the mines with no black grit under their fingernails, but they have the look of the escaped mole making its bewildered way above ground. Ronnie is the union representative who mentioned that he had been spending a lot of time in Washington, D.C. I had been expecting to hear self-important allusions to high-level lobbying meetings and the ordeals of flying first-class to and from the nation’s capital. Far from it. He drives back and forth which, given his girth, must be uncomfortable if not painful. He comments to me that he’s tired of hearing every supposed representative of the miners’ interests talking about nothing but fossil fuel. He wants to change the subject to the hundred thousand miners’ pensions endangered as the mines close and fewer mining companies pay into the pension fund. Two of the three ostentatiously vow not to take any partisan political stand, since the UMWA is a non-partisan union. The third compares the man in the White House to a fascist führer while the other two bite their tongues. These guys know the story; but they’re desperate to save the retirement benefits of their fellow miners, something that gets lost in the climate change debate. One of the three tells me he never doubted climate science. The other two bite their tongues and don’t contradict him.

We also chat about mining and its history in this area. We talk about long-wall mining and the difference it has made. Jay knows every abandoned mine in the area and is called in to consult on many of them. I would like to accompany him sometime. Jack is also active in Democratic Party politics and invites me to attend one of their meetings. I’ve read up on this area and they are pleased to have a knowledgeable and eager listener for their stories. After we part, and I’m on my way to my car in the parking lot, Jack motions me over to his pickup as he is about to drive off. I open the passenger door and he gleefully shows me the forty-five caliber handgun which he carries around with him loaded. I wonder what he’s afraid of. If the cliché response is supposed to be illegal immigrants or black people, that makes little sense here. He isn’t the type. The only illegal immigrant around here is probably the Mexican owner of a restaurant next door to Bonnie’s. He’s been marked for deportation because of the technicality of having left the country twice, once for a funeral and a second time to see an old girlfriend. He’s in his second or third round of appeals; and judging from what I’ve read, everyone around here likes him for his record of community involvement and is on his side. So why the need to be heavily armed? I suspect a generalized fear resulting from the incessant vivid reporting of all violence anywhere, coupled with all the murder and mayhem in the media and entertainment.

From West Frankfort, I follow back roads toward Harrisburg. Passing through the small town of Galatia, population just under 1,000, I notice a sign for the public library. Since libraries always interest me, I stop in front of the small, new building and go in. Only the young librarian is present. We chat about the town and area. When I tell her about my meeting with the retired miners, she mentions that the mine that sustained Galatia shut down last year. When I express my amazement at the gun culture of otherwise sensible people, she shocks me by saying that when it comes to this, she is inclined to “a Marxist approach.” This of course doesn’t mean that she is a Marxist, or even that such an approach is fruitful (I’m more inclined in this respect to think in Freudian terms); but the anomaly of a young librarian who doesn’t know anything about me adopting what would surely be considered a radical theoretical approach strikes me like a bolt of lightning. I learn a bit about her working-class background and education and that she is in touch with local poets and the librarians at the John A. Logan Community College which I plan to visit tomorrow. It’s beginning to dawn on me that beyond the penumbra of the big state university, which I unreflectively tend to regard as an island of enlightenment in a sea of cultural darkness, a diffuse diaspora of light connects and illuminates obscure places. In the course of these two days, my impression is confirmed.

On Friday morning, I have the good fortune to meet with David Cochran who teaches history at John A. Logan Community College at Carterville. I have his name from David Roediger, a professor of black history at the University of Kansas, Lawrenceville, formerly at University of Missouri, Colombia. We meet in one of those delightful cafes that seem to thrive more in Southern Illinois than elsewhere, Rise Up in downtown Carterville. Cochran has family from my old hometown of Carmi. He has a career path that paralleled but angled off from mine, insofar as his teaching career has been mainly at two community colleges in Southern Illinois, Shawnee in the far south and John. A. Logan. He is as open to meeting with me as several of the SIU professors I’ve approached have been unresponsive, evasive, puzzled, and put off by my regional and generalist interests. I’m becoming more and more aware that universities on the whole look upward and outward while libraries and community colleges orient themselves toward the communities they serve. I know this first-hand. In my entire career as a university professor I paid almost no attention to the nearby community colleges. Why? To be honest, it was because they were beneath me. Yes, this was my attitude and the attitude of my erstwhile academic colleagues, though they might condescendingly claim otherwise.

Immediately, I come upon an example of the responsive action of the community college. The city of Herrin was sustained for many years by a Maytag factory. The company was bought up by Whirlpool which then proceeded to shut the plant down. David obtained a sabbatical leave to interview the employees about their lives at Maytag, the nature of the work, the fabric of social relations woven by their labor, and the experience and outlook of those who gave their lives and, in some cases, sacrificed their physical well-being to the company. A local woman with experience with the theater heard about the project and collaborated in refashioning the interviews as a stage production which was performed at John A. Logan.

David showed me the script and performance video. All spoken parts are from his interviews or the utterances of the management. After a pompous opening by a Maytag corporate voice, the workers narrate their individual and collective life in an industry that created and supported a community and then disappeared, leaving its shipwrecked survivors to contemplate their bleak and reduced future. One might think that all this is banal, self-evident, old hat. It isn’t. I didn’t anticipate this point of view of the unemployed worker: “The thing that bothered me most was . . . losing your job with seven or eight hundred people simultaneously was a shock because everyone was going after pretty much the same jobs.” This is one of those obvious truths that are hidden in plain sight: the capitalist order creates community and then converts it into a war of all against all. When the docudrama was performed, the fired workers attended and were invited up on the stage.

I am curious about the holdings of the John A. Logan Community College. When I tour its well-stocked library and mention the name of the Galatia librarian, there is an enthusiastic response. I recognize that there is an intellectual network closer to the community outside the closed, upward-striving circles of the university. I’m only discovering the obvious, yet it feels a bit like a revelation. The Russians would say in place of our sarcastic, “You’ve reinvented the wheel,” Vyotkroili Ameriku: “You have just discovered America.” I’m discovering America.

On Friday afternoon, I’m hoping at last to meet Preston Ewing, a local historian of Cairo and of its local liberation movement of the Sixties with whom I’ve exchanged letters and spoken by phone. I drive south to Cairo, hoping to find the museum in the Customs House open as announced and Preston as its curator. It’s locked. I eat lunch at Shemwell’s to give it time; but after lunch it still doesn’t open. I cross the street to the Cairo City Treasurer’s Office and ask if anyone will be coming to open the museum. A tall gentlemanly black man offers to call on my behalf. On the phone, he identifies himself as Preston. Though averse to interviews, he is friendly and expansive in person, more than happy to offer me an impromptu lecture on Cairo history. The city has been re-founded or re-constituted multiple times. The African American population has actually had its ups as well as downs. In the later nineteenth century, the black population achieved advances in education and involvement in public life; but the turn of the century coincided with the new waves of racism that annulled this modest incrementalism.

Preston Ewing tells me a horrifying story about Southern Illinois. In addition to the lynching of 1908, another black man accused of stealing a white woman’s purse was in danger of the same fate. To avoid more reprimands from the state government, the Cairo officers of the law dressed their prisoner in a police uniform, put him on a train, and told the engineer to proceed at high speed without stopping to Champaign County in the north central part of the state. The speed was necessary because word of their ploy spread to nearby cities where mobs were waiting to pull the man off the train and lynch him on the spot. Resenting this tactic, the town of Cobden sued the Illinois Central for speeding in its city limits. Lynching, which I had always imagined as a spontaneous crime of passion, was in fact a coordinated civic operation, uniting towns in the region. Race hatred, exclusion, and mob action drew communities together in a perverse citizens’ front. Belonging meant condemning and cruelly murdering a black man.
In Carbondale, I meet with the retired SIU anthropologist Kathy Ward. If I were Smiley in a Le Carré spy novel, Kathy would be the shrewd and knowledgeable retired spy Connie Sachs, except that it isn’t alcoholism that debilitates Kathy but multiple sclerosis. She is cordial with me but sharp-tongued when it comes to scholarly sloppiness or male imperiousness. She no doubt has her reasons, but we disagree regarding Preston Ewing whom I admire for dedicating his life to the chronicling of his sinking ship of a city and the sad aftermath of its brave civil rights struggle. She faults Preston for not sharing his materials or acknowledging his scholarly errors. Kathy has done scholarly research on Cairo, as well as field work with poor women and prostitutes in Bangladesh. She is in touch with the vegan counterculture of the Carbondale area. I always come away from seeing her with good advice and a good feeling. I’m inclined to attribute our different outlook to our philosophical orientations and a generational divide. My formative period was the late Sixties, hers the late Seventies. I can’t idealize the Sixties for the simple reason that I remember too clearly the aspirations of the time and know how many of them met defeat. But I also cannot accept the view which is increasingly common on both the Left and the Right that humanity is divided between the immutable and homogeneous powers of darkness and light, of which entire sectors can be written off by us, the creatures of light. I was shaped by the complex impulses that informed and transformed my generation in an era when a few passing years revealed the mutability of consciousness, when pigeonholing people the way we do now would have been like trying to sort pebbles during an avalanche. I abhor the Manichaeism that pervades even the mental world of the opposition. Only deep defeatism assumes that people cannot change.

By the New Year, my plan for researching the mentality of people in Southern Illinois is at last falling into place after a number of tentative projects have had to be abandoned. My first strategy was inspired by Barbara Ehrenreich’s classic immersion method of studying the lives of working people by working alongside them: Nickeled and Dimed. I realized, however, that I couldn’t absent myself from my family for longer periods without causing anxiety for them and me. Next, I thought I might combine my approach with the institutionalized activity of canvassing for the Democratic Party candidate in the 2020 presidential race. There wouldn’t be anything incomprehensible about knocking on doors and explaining that I wanted to speak to people about politics and then adding some questions about their circumstances, lives, and general opinions. If this was a provocation, it would have been the same for everyone I approached. Instead of attempting to avoid the so-called “observer effect” of an academic investigator who annoys people, I could employ the constant/variable relationship of the well-ordered experiment by offering everyone the same annoyance. Then I realized that the political context would overwhelm the conversation. What good is standardization if the technique dominates the discussion?

Even more important is the question of what I am actually investigating. Initially, this was a matter of assessing the degree to which people were aware of a particular identity as Southern Illinoisans, and, in the event that there is such an identity, how it is understood. I had outlined a protocol of questions to assess whether respondents saw their part of the state as a region unto itself or merely the southern third of the state. What, if anything, set us apart? What was our relation to the state, nation, and world? Was there a connection between regional consciousness, social status, and political leaning? My initial soundings suggested that the poorer and less mobile are more inclined to register their region with interest and concern: the black Uber passenger who took obvious pride in his roots in this region; the poor citizens of Cairo who refused to move away because of their attachment to the place where they and their ancestors had suffered so much; or the laid off miner who asked me what I thought would become of Southern Illinois. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the academics of Southern Illinois University were the least likely to attach any significance to the region as such.

One thing I suspected all along and have now confirmed to my personal satisfaction is that universities can narrow the range of vision by thrusting their non-academic surroundings into a blind spot or zone of willful disregard. Regionalism bears a negative connotation in national politics and an association with provincialism in cultural or social studies. It’s no coincidence that one exception to this rule, Prof. emer. Lothar Hönnighausen of the University of Bonn, is both a Faulkner scholar and a German. Germany accords to its regions a respect that is rarer in this country (with Faulkner’s rural Mississippi as an exception to the rule). With dry wit, Hönnighausen characterized a typical academic response to regionalism as a proposed object of research by recounting an anecdote under the heading of “On the Politics of Scholarly Terminology”:

A while ago I tried to convince a young colleague, who is very promising and aware of the kinds of projects nowadays likely to meet with peer approval, to participate in our regions and regionalism project. When she seemed reluctant, I told her that the terms might indeed suggest provinciality and backwardness, but that they were going to make a very progressive use of regionalism and would explore it also as ethnic marginality, gendered space, and a discourse of liminality and boundary maintenance. That convinced her, and she warmed even more to the idea when she heard that some of the contributors seemed to regard regions and regionalism only as a kind of sociocultural metaphor and that “region” and “regionalism” might not even appear in the title, which most likely would be something like Postmodern Concepts of Spatiality. (Lothar Hönnighausen, Marc Frey, James Peacock, and Niklaus Steiner [Eds.], Regionalism in the Age of Globalism, Vol. 1: Concepts of Regionalism [Madison: Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, 2005], p. 158, italics in the source).

Ethnic marginality, gendered space, discourse of liminality, boundary maintenance, postmodern spatiality—these are the “progressive” concepts that can be expected to elicit peer approval, whereas one particular region or regionalism per se evokes provinciality and backwardness. Yet if marginality is an attractive concept, what could be more marginal than the rural regions of the world? If intersectionality is a progressive concept, aren’t the minced rural interstices of a rapidly urbanizing world preeminently intersectional?

As if by some universal magnetism, both the academics and the less educated are drawn upward. This reverse gravitational pull exerts the same force but does so in various ways, attracting the rural to the city, drawing the Third World to the Metropolis, the common to the celebrity, the particular to the universal, or the banal to the high concept. This force animates the culture of Liberals. A recent study of the funding patterns that neglect state politics included this observation: “What liberal donors do love, I was told, is a program with a unique, special air. They also revel in what one person called ‘the New York Times version of social change,’ meaning elite-oriented and federal in focus. The left, then, is largely guided by the whims of rich people, whereas the right is guided by their rational business decisions” (Meaghan Winter, All Politics is Local: Why Progressives Must Fight for the States [New York: Bold Type Books, 2019], p. 38). At the local level, parents and educators tell their children to “go to college and make something of themselves.” This implies that those who stay behind amount to little.

My admittedly general and unpolished term for this attraction is “universal status climbing.” The term should extend its basic association with social climbing to a common denominator broad enough to encompass the elitism of the billionaire, the theoretical predilection of the grad student, the ambition of the high school student seeking admission to the Ivy League college, the gravitation of rural people toward the city or of the immigrant toward the shiny world of the metropolis, promoted even in the remotest corners of the underdeveloped world. While all may have complex motives, whether it’s the billionaire’s real interest in reform (or in a tax deduction), the student’s sincere desire to pursue some particular field of study, the rural job seeker’s need for locally unavailable opportunity, or the refugee’s flight from violence and climate degradation, a similar attraction motivates all to seek a higher status. This upward attraction has a universal impact. It divides the world into superior and inferior spheres, realms of light and darkness. The polarity of the extremes tinges our perceptions of either. If rising was once specific to divergent cultures with their incommensurate hierarchies, the meaning of upwardness, like all other information and aspiration, passes through a metropolitan filter and gets standardized by informational techniques. Everything particular, including regions, becomes ipso facto inferior. Merit exists only to the degree that it is reflected back from the center. The upward and abstract direction is defined not by what we hope to find. It’s quite possible that few even know what they are looking for. Upwardness is characterized negatively by flight from the peripheral and the anomalous. Power attracts. Conformity enforces. Powerless anomaly equates with insignificance. The poor are simply losers. The non-conformist must join an oppressed group or wither in idiosyncratic weirdness. We crave attention and celebrity like plants rotating mindlessly toward the sun. The democratization of fama is an age-old tendency, reinforced and magnified by globalized information technology. The current concentration and focalization of meaning and status orient us toward a polarized, de-personalized, normative notion of reality. Whatever doesn’t fit into a recognized category isn’t quite real and therefore escapes notice.

Finally, I begin to realize that my planned research methods were perhaps a product of that same urge to conform. I decide to forget methodological standardization and simply look for and describe the anomalous and the individual as an object of interest in itself. I must also admit that my approach was conditioned by my life circumstances and my researches on the literature of German mysticism and dissent with its counterintuitive paradigms of reality in which forces of irreducible particularity struggle with forces of polarization. I also have to acknowledge my personal circumstances. I am an older man at odds with his beloved family. Family tensions have put me in an impossible double-bind conflict. Add to this the sense of political helplessness and malaise as the impeachment of a congenital liar and bully moves toward certain derailment and military provocation threatens war. As a matter of faith in humanity, I can’t accept the polarized worldview harbored by both sides of our political divide. I don’t expect my investigation to prove anything by the standards of professional social science. It’s enough to confirm that the world isn’t the apocalyptic battleground of polarized forces, a worldview embraced by people ranging from right-wing Evangelicals to secular progressives. It’s enough for me to confirm the dignity of the individual. If this is whistling in the dark, so be it.

On my first trip south after the New Year, I again notice something that should be utterly obvious: as soon as I abandon my thoughts of obtaining standard data and simply try to get to know people better, my perception of them gains depth and complexity. It’s as if I had put on 3-D glasses. Stopping again in West Frankfort, I eat lunch with the UMWA officials Ronnie Huff and Jack McReynolds. They are celebrating a congressional bill that passed the previous day to secure the miners’ pensions and health insurance. Ronnie would gladly celebrate in a bar, but he doesn’t drink. He has nothing of the macho miner about him. Aged sixty-three, he began by working for twenty-eight years in the mines and has been a union member for forty-two, most recently as its international representative. Being overweight gives his pensive, boyish features a youthful smoothness. He has had a long and successful marriage, but without children. Within his extended family, he says, there are plenty of children that are as good as their own. From his tone in talking about his family and the pension security of the miners, I suspect that his parental solicitousness extends to them as well.

His friend and colleague Jack McReynolds is eighty-five, the president of the UMWA local, and a man widely liked and admired. I gather this from the way friends and union members hail him in passing in the restaurant where we’re having lunch. His grandmotherly face wears an expression of constant, wry bemusement. He enjoys a good character-based joke. He is a short, slight man—an occupational advantage for miners and jockeys. At first, I thought he might be compensating his small stature with his 45 caliber “little friend,” which he showed me in the parking lot when we first met; but now I learn of other possible motives for going around armed. Fifty years ago, the reform candidate for UMWA leadership Jock Yablonsky was murdered with his family at the behest of the corrupt union president Tony Boyle. While McReynolds was out campaigning for Yablonsky, his wife got a call that threatened murder if she didn’t get her husband off the street. Later in the day, while chatting with a retired miner in Kelly’s café in Galatia, I hear stories of Jack’s legendary hard-ball defense of his fellow miners. When the company insurance plan refused to pay for an indispensable but expensive operation for a miner, he organized a press conference with local television, radio, and newspapers to cast a spotlight on the company’s hard-heartedness. The management relented. In an altercation with a mine official, the commonly known accompaniment of Jack’s “little friend” encouraged his opponent to back down. It occurs to me that facing constant danger below ground could cause PTSD, an awareness of constant threat assuaged by the pressure of a loaded weapon in one’s pocket. However, I wouldn’t rule out the impact of our gun culture which obviously affects some people more than others. I can’t imagine the gentle, pensive Ronnie going about similarly armed.

They tell me stories about the physical challenges of mining. Jack’s period of operating a roof-bolter shook the wits out of him. Heavy slabs of shale would bludgeon you like an axe; roofs would collapse. Jack is a Korean War veteran, a fifth-generation miner who has put in thirty-nine years below ground. Both remember with a certain pride earlier family hardship. Ronnie’s parents were dirt poor until his father got a job in the mines. Jack’s grandfather earned extra money as a bootlegger but sternly warned his children that whisky was only for selling, not for drinking. His wife’s grandparents were so poor that they lived in a covered wagon while traveling around for harvest work in the South. These stories might be taken as a confirmation that miners are motived above all by their material interests. Since this is what I always assumed, I had expected to hear scorn heaped on climate science. I know a mine equipment manufacturer in another village who greets every spell of frigid weather by sarcastically attributing it to “global warming.” So far, I haven’t heard anything of the kind here. The miners are a reserve army of labor ordered into retreat but evidently maintaining their uncomplaining discipline even as they abandon the field of action. What I suspected about my Shawneetown friends—that they were less motivated by material factors such as health insurance and more by an “honor and shame” culture which had its correlative in their pride of ancestry—applies to Jack and Ronnie as well. There is certainly a big material advantage in gaining pension security, but there is also honor in fighting for it. In addition to his UMWA activity and work for the Democratic Party, Jack is an active Freemason who believes that the Masons were targeted for persecution by Hitler.

Later in the day, I visit the public library in tiny Galatia, population 950, where the mine was closed down the previous year. Since the young director, Chastady Bennett, is reading to children at a school, I talk to an older library employee named Alice Hall. Age seventy, she and her family have spent their recorded history in a house just outside of town. Her husband worked in the local mine and loved his job as long as the mine was owned by Kerr McGee, but as soon as it was bought out by the American Coal Company conditions declined and older miners were targeted for dismissal. When this happened to her husband, he asked himself at her urging what he most liked doing. The answer was working on cars. He started a new business and is once again satisfied with life. Their three children all live around the same hill within hailing distance of their parents. To Alice, these changes are a normal part of life. Older citizens of Galatia drift away. New ones move in. Is it a mistake, I ask, to tell young people that they should go to college and move to a larger place to make something of themselves? Everything is reducible to the problem of finding gainful employment. The routines of life are so predictable that there is no point in raising questions or treating things as mysterious. Yet the outside world can pose a threat. When her grandfather in his old age no longer knew anyone in town, he refused to go in to the post office for his mail on the grounds that there was no one there but “furiners.” She finds it alarming that after a reform school opened in Harrisburg and parents of its incarcerated juveniles followed them to town, previously unheard of “drive by shootings” began to occur. Though Galatia is separated from Harrisburg by a considerable stretch of back road, this alarms Alice Hall.

Galatia is situated on a little traveled road. It has two thriving restaurants, a pizzeria in the center and Kelly’s café restaurant at the edge of town. The remaining larger business is a gas distributor. There isn’t a single chain franchise restaurant, and the town is “dry” without bars. I could imagine that during the Roaring Twenties, the anti-bootlegging Ku Klux Klan would have had its sympathizers in a town whose founder or first citizen, David Upchurch, was born in 1797 in North Carolina and settled here around 1823. When I arrive in Kelley’s for an early dinner, the place is nearly empty. It is attractive, with promising lunch specials. I order homemade chili and a grilled cheese, followed by apple cobbler with ice cream and coffee. The food is attentively made and the service congenial and unprepossessing. An awkward teenage African American kid and a somewhat older white girl walk in together and order the lunch special. Next are two older men of working age. I nod to them as they walk by me and have no difficulty striking up a conversation with the friendlier of the two. He is a retired miner who knows and admires Ronnie and Jack and is glad that the lobbying to guarantee the miners’ pensions has been successful. I ask him whether he misses mining. He misses the “camaraderie” of its friendships. These strike me based on his account as somewhat akin to the solidarity of combat soldiers. The relationships of miners or soldiers are in either case forged by constant peril and the existential necessity of standing by one’s comrades. The retired miner, Ben Hankins, is grateful for my curiosity. I learn from him that Southeastern Illinois College has been playing an important role in retraining the unemployed. Ben recalls his time working on an associate degree when unemployed. The young students who were his classmates were surprised at the scope of practical knowledge exhibited by middle-aged classmates. He relishes the memory of their conversations and his pleasure in the respect accorded to his life experience.

Toward the end of January, I journey south again in order to observe two community colleges: John A. Logan at Carterville, near Carbondale, and Shawnee Community College in a completely rural area between the rural counties and the towns it serves: Anna, Cairo, Metropolis, and Vienna. Arriving in Carbondale, I have dinner with Kathy Ward who tells me about her organic farming operation, which interests me on behalf of my son. Before the conversation ends, she reminds me with some insistence of her urgent advice that I “see someone,” a therapist, that is. I had forgotten all about this advice and am not sure that I need counseling about “what is best for me.” If I have anger issues, I know perfectly well why; and as for the imperative of managing my anger, the recommended commonsensical steps for doing so are available on the internet. I have already internalized them. However, when Kathy mentions her reverence for the books and therapeutic approach of Harriett Lerner, it occurs to me that this is none other than the mother of Ben Lerner, two of whose critically acclaimed novels I’ve read. His latest novel, The Topeka School, evidently unabashedly incorporates his doting parents into what amounts to a family-centered memoir. This family element which seems so much at variance from my generation’s paradigm of filial rebellion and arduous self-discovery, intrigues and attracts me. How is it possible that this nice Jewish boy, the son of such solicitous know-it-all parents, is able to lend his writing the flair of originality once reserved for rebels and loners? Later, I look for the books of the Lerners, son and mother, in the local Barnes & Noble, but I find only the mother’s. Prominent among them is the one recommended by Kathy, The Dance of Anger. It typically preaches the kind of self-help that orbits between the obvious and the patronizing. A husband who forbids his wife to take part in the author’s “anger seminar” gets gently chloroformed in Harriett’s therapeutic solicitousness. The reader can only stand in awe of the avoidance of anger. Is this what we’ve come to? Her son’s most recent novel reacts to the Trump era by turning inward and finding its seeds within himself. Am I doing the same? We’re becoming world champions of anger management in this country.

Later the same evening, I meet Mike McNally who will host my visit to Shawnee Community College on Friday. He is a native of Liverpool who studied briefly in Wales but found the atmosphere of the British university uncongenial. He emigrated to Illinois in 1994, studied at several community colleges and then at Carbondale, and eventually found a permanent teaching position at Shawnee Community College. He is a naturalized U.S. citizen, married to an American archivist who formerly worked on the Dewey Project, with two teenaged children. He has retained his Liverpool accent and his loyalty to his native city’s soccer prowess. When he explains that his dissertation project aims to show that “Liverpool exceptionalism” is elusive and that the city is more typical than is commonly thought, I get the feeling that we are somehow on parallel trajectories.

The next two days, I meet with David Cochran and also attend a talk on Wednesday at the CarbondalePublic Library on “Mound City in the Civil War.” The talk is by Darrel Dexter, a history teacher at rural Egyptian High School in the deep south of the state. The talk is well-researched, well-attended, and ably presented, but it offers a slice of history in which no non-whites occur. It is sponsored by an active and enthusiastic local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution and introduced by their solemn and elaborate rituals including the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag. They also pledge their devotion to historical remembrance, American patriotism, and “enlightenment.” The talk is followed by a chapter meeting in which older candidates queue up in the hope of having their claim of descent from a “patriot” recognized. I realize that I have never in my life encountered a D.A.R meeting or chapter. I associate the D.A.R. with WASPish matrons mobilizing against FDR’s New Deal. When in the following days I hear two other references to the organizational activities of the D.A.R., I conclude that this must be a sign of the times. But before cramming the D.A.R. into the slot-hole reserved for Trump-era obscurantism, it occurs to me to wonder how much its revival owes to the cultivation by conservatives and liberals alike of new prized genealogies such as, not least of all, the hallowed descent from the Holocaust survivor. There is a kind of American aristocracy of victimization. I remember reading recently how the star of the Netflix “Russian Doll” series, Natasha Lyonne, dubbed herself on the basis of her grand-parents’ concentration camp suffering “Auschwitz royalty,” a reference that floats even without the irony. Every public library I visit has a much-frequented section for genealogy. Ancestry, that trace element of vanished aristocracy, has become an American obsession. This is the real and profound sign of the times. The malaise and failure of action, our loss of the infamous “master narrative of progress” yields to a cultivation of descent by birth. I can imagine myself doing the same. I have done the same, though with the illusion of associating my ancestry with some imagined noblesse oblige. I harbor my own inner D.A.R.-style cult and am in no position to claim ideological superiority.

On Thursday, I attend two lectures by Cochran, first on black history and then on colonial US history. The first engages the students in thoughtful discussion. The second is compellingly structured in order to compare and contrast colonial Massachusetts and colonial Virginia in terms of social constituency and religious foundations, followed by a comparative evolution of the institutions of white indenture and black slavery. I haven’t heard a better or more engaging lecture anywhere. After this, we meet for lunch with two retired colleagues of David’s. One is a very spry 82-year old retired anthropologist, an ex-Marine and enthusiastic traveler, Michael Stadler; the other a retired psychology instructor Gary Caldwell who is from a small town near where I grew up. The genial Stadler is no less interested in his ancestry; but he recounts it without airbrushing out the Ku Klux Klan racism of one grandfather and the antisemitism of a grandmother. He is fully aware of how repulsive this is but wants to tell the truth about his family. This is how it should be.

On Friday morning, I drive down south early to Shawnee Community College, a smaller institution located in a remote rural setting which is pleasantly hilly and wooded. Typically, community colleges are located outside the towns they serve, as if topographical removal were needed for the educational rite of passage to be taken seriously. This college is so far removed that I’m wondering whether its physical isolation wasn’t somehow doubly necessary. Inside, it’s a haven of quiet learning. I gather that it’s situated at midpoint between the counties and towns of its district. As at SIC, rural isolation gives it a monastic air. Attending Mike’s interesting lecture, I notice that several participants are not on site and do not take part in the bits of discussion interjected into the lecture outline of nineteenth-century history. The lecture and discussion do not differ from what I’m accustomed to at my university despite the virtual presence of students on screens above the lectern. The students here are well-served.

After class, I talk to a student who is one of the more successful members of this class. McKenzie Reager is from a nearby rural area. Her parents are educated and active in business. She went to nearby Century High School while also taking courses at the Community College. She had a rough time when her father was the county tax assessor and, in his official capacity, incurred the enmity of the parents of her classmates. For a time, she wanted to transfer to the larger high school in Metropolis but was persuaded to stay. She enjoyed the support of teachers and 4-H sponsors who encouraged and inspired her. After taking college classes while in high school, she is finishing one full year early and is looking forward to studying next year at the Morton campus of the University of Tennessee. Her ancestors hail from that state; however, this isn’t her reason for choosing it. I ask her why not SIU. Carbondale, it seems, has the reputation of a party school. I had the impression that people in Southern Illinois no longer saw it as their very own university, and this is confirmed by McKenzie.

When I ask her what she would want to say to an exchange student coming from far away, her answer summarizes her personal experience. It’s possible to make the best of what you have. Now that I enjoy her confidence, I ask why in her opinion Southern Illinois people, who were once strong Democratic voters, solidly favor Trump. Her answer is interesting even in its gross generality. Other politicians in Washington appear bound to groups, interests, or organizations that determine their positions. Trump is outside these webs of interconnection and can therefore speak boldly in the interest of the country. What this observation suggests to me is that Trump’s behavior and speech, which seem so outrageous to his opponents, may be a source of his appeal, and not necessarily only because his supporters want to see Mexicans and minorities humiliated. What strikes the rest of us as out of bounds is perceived as evidence of his capacity to act on principle. This casts his defiance of taboos in a different light. No one who opposes him should be assuaged by this; but the innocence and lack of animus in McKenzie’s response are worth noting. Her attitude is probably more typical than the image we assign to Trump’s supporters suggests. It’s misguided to write them off as nothing but racists and fascists. It’s possible to be wrong without being a fascist. Trump’s critics and his admirers are looking at the same evidence and interpreting it in opposite ways. His supporters seem to think that getting so many things wrong is the precondition of getting one big thing right. It is possible to be irrational and wrong even without putting on a MAGA cap and cheering for lewd and aggressive slogans, though from what I hear there are those that do. This is a description, not a defense, of the thinking of a Trump supporter. Nowadays, anything short of outraged condemnation flies in the face of our polarized self-righteousness.

McKenzie also launches into a defense of gun rights, as if even restricting the use of automatic firearms were tantamount to depriving the farmer the bare means for shooting pests. She approvingly cites the incident in a Texas church where a gun-bearing church member was able to kill an active shooter after only two people in the congregation were shot. From this, it seems only logical that everyone should carry a gun all the time. I ask McKenzie whether she carries a weapon. No, she doesn’t, but her father does. It hardly surprises me that the parental sources of McKenzie’s opinions don’t encourage their petite and lady-like daughter to bear arms, though she travels alone to Paducah, Kentucky, to work. It’s enough that her father has a gun to affirm the traditional authority which is more at stake than anyone’s physical safety. Her parents probably don’t go around all the time with weapons themselves. Common sense and habitual ease would make it superfluous in this rural backwater. Political analysts claim that what conservative voters care about is “guns, God, and gays.” But what, in their minds, do guns have to do with religion and sexuality? No matter how strong the association is at the moment, it’s hardly the bedrock of a durable political establishment.

At Shawnee Community College, two other conversations reinforce the direction of my research. The first is with Rob Woolridge, an English instructor and recent SIU graduating Ph.D. Rob is from Anna. His father is an electrician and his mother a nurse. Rarely do I meet anyone with whom I share more personal priorities. Rob agrees that the most important thing we can do for students is to teach them to write. This requires reading literature and it entails learning to think clearly and cogently. At SIU, Rob admired a senior professor who taught a freshman writing course once a year. He agrees with my analogy of the physician who can’t refuse treatment to patients because their ailments are too rudimentary. In teaching writing, Rob has developed a procedure that makes the most of the limited time available. Even at this rural Community College with its unspecialized students, he is planning a course on the literature of Generation X, assigning Bright Lights, Big City, Less Than Zero, Fight Club, and other novels that can be read as a witness of the zeitgeist. I’m impressed that he had the audacity and skill to assign the tricky “Battle Royal” chapter from Ellison’s Invisible Man and couldinspire students to embrace it for future use in the course. With his Alan Ginsberg sweatshirt, Rob evokes an equivalent of the concept of the intelligentsia which I absorbed from classical Russian literature. In Turgenev or Tolstoy, the typical member of the intelligentsia isn’t a university professor. More characteristically, the intelligentsia consists of literate and reflective individuals living in provincial obscurity but motivated by a profound concern for the people. The Russian intellectuals are Chekhovian outsiders, conscious of the role of their generation and concerned with the social problems of their region and nation.

Before I leave and drive north to get ahead of bad weather, I have the good fortune to engage in one more conversation. It sums up some issues I’ve been pondering and confirms some of the conclusions I’ve arrived at. My conversation is with Mildred Henderson. She is a student and writing tutor who happens to be my age. She is also like me the child of parents who were older when she was born. Because of the age gap between her and her father, she is curious about an antecedent generation usually within living memory but to her a puzzle. Like me, she has rural roots. Since she has lived elsewhere and come back to Southern Illinois, she experiences it as a special place, as home. Many natives either take it for granted or disdain it for its lack of economic opportunity. Whenever she comes back from elsewhere, she is thrilled at the sight of the rock outcroppings on the interstate route through the Shawnee Forest. I expect to hear something of personal interest from Mildred and I do.

Our conversation takes place in the room where she works as a tutor to help students improve their writing skills. Evidently, she senses that I’m genuinely interested in what she has to say and is excited to be able to tell me about her life. Before I learn the details of her family history from her autobiographical essay, she recollects several scenes that have the vividness of a cinematic preview. The most horrible episode is one that she mentions in passing, that of a cousin who wrote a note to a white girl and was dragged, crying and pleading for mercy, out of his school and beaten to death. This happened near rural Dermott, Arkansas, before the families of either parent sought refuge separately in Southern Illinois. The fact that the families only converged by marriage here is either a coincidence or a result of the close-knit community of black migrants or a sign of the mysterious connections that haunt her story. There are many things she didn’t know. She had heard rumors that her father’s good looks (“high yellow” and red hair) and musical talents made him dangerously attractive to white women, that he left behind another family in Arkansas, and that he had Masonic connections that aided him in establishing himself in Illinois.

In any case, the families of both parents ran afoul of white folk in rural segregationist Arkansas. I get the picture of her mother’s people escaping to the yonder shore of Illinois, migrating as a family with their livestock on a ferry or riverboat. In Southern Illinois, her father was able to purchase eighty acres of farm and woodland near Olmsted. At first, the white neighbors were incredulous that black people could own land that had been freely used by them for hunting and drinking; but in time, diplomatic relations were established with the neighbors. I get a picture of little Millie walking much of the way to an all-black one-room schoolhouse where, according to her, the teachers were better and more dedicated than at the local white schools. When the segregated schools were dissolved, she was sent to the Century High School McKenzie attended six decades later. When her teacher introduced her as a new student and left the classroom momentarily, other kids moved their desks away from hers. Thanks to the dedication of her segregated teachers, however, she was better prepared than the white kids and by nature a fast learner. She kept her head down and put up with the humiliations. When she debuted in her cheerleader’s costume, she overheard a white mother telling her daughter that Mildred was really just a “nigger.” Racism aside, girls that age are sensitive about their appearance. Who isn’t?

She graduated from high school at the top of her class. A white boy, assumed to be the valedictorian, was already preparing his speech. When the administration realized that Mildred was above him by a decimal fraction, they came to her with the request that she cede the honor of giving the valedictorian speech to him. Always afraid of much worse things happening, and perhaps understandably shy about addressing a class that never entirely accepted her, she agreed. Years later, on her seventieth birthday, a black newspaper reporter interviewed her and then went to the high school to confirm the record. He noticed that photographs hung for the valedictorians of all classes except hers. As Rochefoucauld put it, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. She was offered scholarships to SIU and Murray State in Kentucky but dropped out of SIU after one semester. The scholarship didn’t pay enough to keep her from getting hungry. She got tired of having to go home for a full meal. When she tells me about this, I wonder if it wasn’t difficult to transition from a rural background to a large predominantly white university campus in the Sixties. I know the difference a rural background made back then, aside from being black. I didn’t suffer but I remember how amused my Chicago classmates were that my Southern Illinois dialect didn’t distinguish between “pen” and “pin” or that I pronounced “umbrella” as a four-syllable word. How would her fellow students, black or white, have reacted to her country ways? When I comment that it’s my impression that black people in Southern Illinois are often more ignored than persecuted, she replies that this was true for her, and that it’s hard to say which is worse. Being invisible is in any case seriously unpleasant.

Mildred found work with Bell Telephone Company in Joliet and did well with this and other jobs. She retired early. I should have asked her if she was drawn to Joliet and those business jobs because, after a childhood of rural and racial isolation, they meant contact with people who shared experiences with her as a black person. After taking early retirement, she moved back and became a foster parent for several years. After this, she enrolled in Shawnee Community College. She was so enthusiastic about studying that she earned four associate degrees. As an adult student, she works as a writing tutor which has become an idealistic commitment. She wants to learn and impart her knowledge. I explain to her my view that the truly educated are those who want knowledge for its own sake. Coming from a background where work is everything, she hadn’t thought about it that way, but it makes sense to her.

These are the facts and memories that Mildred conveys in our conversation. In her essay, they are only the surface weave of deeper and more vexing strands extending to her background, her parents’ lives, and her origins in the world. Her father was a mystery rendered all the more alluring to her, because she was his favorite, the child of his old age that he called his “Bright Eyes.” Her childhood world was bounded by mysteries and informed by the harsh discipline and incessant toil of subsistence farming. When I ask whether my impression is accurate that land ownership was an obsession for poor black people, she replies that it absolutely was. After being forced to work on other people’s land, ownership meant independence and freedom. Children were needed and begotten to help labor on the land. Half-grown girls were married off to working men and, in the case of her parents, with a great disparity of age and no surfeit of love. Frivolity and disobedience were punished by her father with belt-whippings. Her sister and babysitter was whipped for letting little Millie fall off the bed. Only “Bright Eyes,” her father’s youngest, was not whipped. After he was incapacitated by a stroke, he passed his time spoiling her and teaching her the alphabet and to count to one hundred, skills she compares to those imparted by a yet to be founded Head Start program. Her mother worked hardest of all and protested when the older sister who was smart and eager in school was married off with her father’s consent at the age of fourteen to an older man. The sister faced an unhappy, abusive marriage, but managed, while raising children, to obtain a high school equivalency degree and worked her way up to a supervisory position with the I.R.S. before retiring.

Mildred’s depiction of the world of her childhood is anything but idyllic, but it captures a desperately achieved dream: “Working the land was hard, using a horse-drawn plow and manual labor. There were cows to be milked, pigs and chickens to be fed, a big vegetable garden, and two areas (known as ‘patches’) for growing strawberries and peanuts. Almost everything needed to sustain life was grown on the farm. Without running water or electricity, barrels of spring water had to be hauled from a quarter mile away on a sled, pulled by a horse named Fred.” This would have been in the 1950s when I was unaware that any part of Illinois still had horse-drawn plows and houses without electricity. Her mother cooked early and late, looked after her nine children, sewed, did the housework, and tended the garden. The boys were constantly being whipped by their father for any infraction of the discipline required to maintain their independent existence close to the margin of survival. After her father died a twelve-year old brother took responsibility for maintaining the farm so that their mother would not have to remarry to provide for her children.

The details of what came before her time fascinate and torment her. Where did her carpentering, guitar-playing father learn those skills? What was his life in Arkansas? Where was he born, how old when he died? Was it true that he left behind another family in the southern state? Why did he change his name in Illinois? Who was the brother of her father that they heard lived in Chicago? For Mildred, genealogy is “a topic generating surprisingly strong emotions of jealousy and anger. I cannot help but feel jealous of those who can trace their ancestry back through generations, and anger because I cannot. Not only do I feel the anguish of not being able to trace our family ancestry because of slavery in the 1800s, but also the sorrow of history lost by my father’s decision to hide his true identity due to the post-slavery racism in the 30s, well over one hundred years later.” (In a postscript to her essay, she writes that her nephew was able to trace her father’s birth year as 1881 and to document that in Arkansas he had been married to a certain Lavinia Parrish, who, like Mildred’s mother, was eighteen at the time they wed. I would like to ask Mildred whether knowing this gave her satisfaction or closure.)

Before I leave, I ask her one more question: how does she feel about Southern Illinois? She absolutely loves it. “I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else!”

Back in Bloomington in late January, I have a visitor from the Seventies. He is the political artist and Holocaust commemorator AKS. In 1974, I shared a ride with him from Illinois to Mexico City where we parted ways for a month before driving back to Illinois where we were both students. Thirty years later, he asked for my help arranging presentations of his political, Holocaust-commemorative art at the two universities of our double city. I hosted his visit, even organizing with my wife a reception so that he could make additional contacts. Now it seems that I have been drafted into the AKS support network and that my assistance is taken for granted for a return trip. I signaled that this time my ability to help would be limited; however, I did manage what should have been a coup. Through a former student, I arranged for AKS to be invited to the History Club. It consists of a large contingent of students who organize independently to discuss topics from history. I point out to AKS that they are eager and interested, not a captive audience. He takes offense when I tell him that since it’s a student-organized event, I won’t attend. I claim that when an uninvited professor is present, the students are less inclined to discuss freely. AKS takes even greater offense. He evidently wants the moral backing of a “general” when facing an anticipated crowd of some thirty “enlisted privates.” I get really annoyed and tell him that, much as I respect ballet, I would not enjoy watching the Nutcracker one more time. I respect his art but don’t want to watch his presentations again. He always begins with an image of a Michelangelo sculpture of Moses with horns, which to AKS proves that in the Middle Ages Christians believed that Jews were devils. Everything he knows about medieval history was absorbed from his Hebrew school a half century ago. Whatever the basis for his assertion, without context it conveys such a stilted version of the history of Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages (the “lachrymose version of Jewish history”), that the resultant distortion clashes with AKS’s preaching of tolerance and his embrace of the victims of prejudice and hatred. When he doesn’t let up, I say some cruel things, but then I feel guilty and go out of my way to help him solve a problem with his PowerPoint material. AKS is astonishingly self-absorbed and devoid of the least curiosity about anything that doesn’t fit in his victim paradigm and passive-aggressive compulsions. But why was I driven to hurt his feelings in such a cruel way? What infuriates me is that he mirrors my own quixotic-creative obsessions. Empathy and self-disdain were the deeper sources of my cruelty. Does the self-importance that I bring to my projects really differ from his? We hate seeing a mirror of our folly. A little knowledge is dangerous; and a little empathy can lead to intolerance and cruelty.

On Monday, I enjoy my regular conversation with the retired sociologist D.S. He has introduced me to the writings of the French social theorist Jacques Ellul and offered sound advice for conducting my research and interviews in Southern Illinois. Ellul’s key insight is that technology (more properly called “technique”) acts as a material force in shaping society and consciousness—a force comparable to and perhaps ultimately stronger than the putative power of Marx’s capital. The latter, in the view of Marx, should have led to the pauperization of the collectivized masses and hence to revolution. The theory of technology or technique advanced by Ellul has a strong suit in addressing the discrepancy between Marx’s historical projection and the modern reality in which technological advances become a dynamic end unto themselves, shaping every aspect of society. According to Ellul, the earliest stage of human development derived its self-understanding from the paradigm of nature. In the second stage, society replaces and subsumes nature as a paradigm. An example of nature as paradigm might be the totem animal that embodies the clan. In the second stage, with society as the paradigm, the natural world is subsumed under the concepts of society, so that, for example, people speak of the “animal and plant kingdoms.” In the modern stage, technique-technology dominates and subsumes nature and society: nature insofar as it is dominated and controlled by technique and understood based on the model of technical process; and society insofar as the social world is subjected to ever-increasing bureaucratic-administrative controls. This could be helpful in thinking about region insofar as Ellul’s technological-administrative dynamic aims at the standardization of all subordinate entities. Individuals, activities, groups, or regions become interchangeable. The idiosyncratic individual or the unique region futilely resists the technical-bureaucratic world. Ellul’s critique unites profound indictments of both socialism and capitalism. Both systems subordinate ends to means, the human end which is freedom to technical efficiency directed to total control. Control for the sake of control.

D.S. applies Ellul’s theory to such phenomena as therapy and the celebrity cult. Therapeutic technique, like the technological imperative, subsumes the stage of nature, thereby appearing as “magic.” Fads and celebrities acquire the authority of a cult invoking magical thinking. This offers an interesting and useful perspective. I was always annoyed by the cult of “professionalism” which mandates that the elite isn’t simply responsible for acting honestly like everyone else but for behaving professionally, which is presumably beyond the grasp of the non-elite. I’ve always suspected that therapy is no more useful for the troubled individual than conversation with a friend or confession with a sympathetic priest. My take on the authority of the therapist or the attraction of the celebrity is based on commodification. What the friend gives us free of charge, the therapist sells as a service. Like any other commodity, the service asserts an authority based on certification, and ultimately on the fact that in a world dominated by commodity exchange, any commodity can claim more authority than what is free. When I consider celebrity, I again see commodification. Celebrity is a commodity that benefits from branding in the way therapy benefits from professional certification. Commodities are enhanced by promotion. And just as therapy gains authority by costing money, celebrities can be “famous for being famous.” I am wary of the idea that technical efficiency is the dominant force of our developing world. Mass transit is more efficient and at least as technologically advanced as the automobile; but the latter rules because its production and domination serve a capital-driven consumer society. The car defeats rapid transit as a commodity, not as a technical achievement. Cars apportion our prestige and “put us in the driver’s seat” in a way that those advanced forms of mass transit can’t. As consumers, we buy a wine produced and aged by primitive methods, not the genetically modified and chemically altered one. As consumers, we’re drawn to the old wine because we’ve heard that superior people prefer it. What counts is owning what everyone owns and adding to it something that others lack, the new gadget or the old wine.

This is only my intuition, not an empirical demonstration. If I glance up and see clouds moving across the sky and leaves shaking on branches, I intuit that they are moved by the same force that tousles my hair and touches my skin. By the same token, I intuit commodification through the worthlessness of the rejects and “losers” of society, in whom I recognize a version of myself. To respond by citing my achievements would be to miss the point completely. It is evident that in the evaluation of a mutating culture, my efforts mean little. A sought-after commodity can lose its appeal from one day to the next; and we all live in the awareness of being potentially expendable. This is intuitively sensed; but without a consensus view of our society, intuition is incapable of proving anything empirically. I cannot prove that the force I experience personally as a “wind-blown” earner-consumer and striver for recognition is the same force that operates in the world above our level of common experience or in that invisible interspace of forces that make the world go round. Sharing my conclusion with D.S. appears to result in an intellectual parting of ways. Nonetheless, I am grateful for our conversations and hope that they continue. Only those I know, or with whom I share common experiences, thoughts, aspirations, and frustrations, are intelligible to me as the unique bearers of a meaning which I am to myself. This is my circle, my family, my neighborhood. Do our networks of relatives, acquaintances, or friends of friends, clustered within walking or easy driving distance, define the unique overlapping region of our circles? Could our circles and regions be organized as a counterweight to technological mass society?

Tonight, February 4, 2020, Trump celebrated his victory over truth and his approval rating climbed to the highest level ever. I no longer know what the word politics means. There are only enemies and allies of truth. Our country has been conquered by an epidemic addiction to falsehood, the euphoria of living the lie, the intoxication of making it all up, of believing whatever you like, but most of all of believing what you are told. Narcotics really do make us high, but they also have terrible consequences. You come to rely on your dealer.

On February 6, I go south again; and this time my developing sense that I’m finding the equivalent of the Russian rural (Chekhovian) intelligentsia blossoms in fresh and intense contacts and conversations. To begin with, I visit the home of David Cochran and his wife Angie Calcaterra in Herrin. Their house is in a subdivision near town. It has a distinct look because the terrain hasn’t been levelled: old-growth trees were left standing, and the rim of the Southern Illinois woodland is visible before the darkness sets in. Angie tells me that all the Italians of Herrin came from the same Italian village north of Milan, and many have the name Calcaterra. They are known as the Calcaterras of Herrin. We drink wine and have a quiet dinner. Before I leave the next morning, David lends me some books and publications. A journal of local culture and history published by a man from Southern Illinois has an article on the attempt to establish a free socialist college for the toilers near the village of Herod in the early 1930s. The handful of students and faculty constructed the buildings themselves; but struggles over funding, accreditation, and relations with locals brought about the undoing of their “College in the Hills.” The founding spirit was a German-American artist who went by the name of Penny Cent, who later moved to New York City and with assistance from Guggenheim cut an impressive figure in the abstract art movement there in the late 1940s and 50s, before disappearing from the scene. Nothing is available on his background or identity. I imagine the typical German trajectory of opposition in his time: the hell of the Western Front, the November Revolution, the workers’ revolts and military Kapp putsch in Berlin; then the euphoric spring breezes of Weimar modernity, Expressionism and artists’ colonies, the resolve to reinvent the world in a new setting redolent of the youthful idealism of the turn-of-the-century back-to-nature Wandervogel movement, as if the great unknown were putty in the hands of the artist. In the available images of his paintings, I detect prismatic rays of genius flashing in the darkness of a past which was once a radiant future.

David also lends me Oscar Micheaux: The Life of America’s First Black Filmmaker by Patrick McGillian (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007). Micheaux was from Metropolis and would deserve the attention squandered by that city on an accidentally associated Superman. Micheaux fought his way up from the most modest beginnings, working in mines and on trains, homesteading in the West, and pioneering the black film in 1919 with great initial success. Here was a determined opponent of D. W. Griffith’s racist, Klan-inspiring Birth of a Nation, an intrepid and ingenious black filmmaker who fearlessly resisted the viciousness unfolding around him and broke ground in several fields. Again, I have the sense that Little Egypt took part in far larger struggles but that its role and even the struggles themselves have been largely forgotten. If somehow all these stories could be presented to people here, it might give us a sense of regional identity, a people-built levee to hold back the hell and highwater of history.

From David, I also borrow a social analysis by the scholar and physician Jonathan M. Metzl, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland (New York: Basic Books, 2019). The title summarizes the thesis. Racism is the key force preventing white America from confronting such lethal challenges as gun violence, suicide by firearm, and inadequate medical care for the uninsured. The book contains heart-rending accounts of white people whose loved ones have died by firearm yet refuse to “blame the gun,” or of decrepit white men afflicted with unhealthy habits and in need of intensive care who reject “socialist Obamacare.” There can be no doubt that racism is woven into the fabric of white identity, encouraging self-defeating contradictions and illusions. But what is true of the historical aggregate and the longue durée might not be sufficient to explain, or show the way out of, our malaise. If it were mainly this white fear of black lawlessness that led to our gun mania, the hysteria should have peaked in the 1960s and 70s, not three or four decades later; and the devotion to guns should be less virulent in Western states, where there are few black people and no threat of black riots. Arguably the opposite is the case. If it is really racism that induces those in need of medical help to reject Obamacare against their own vital interests, why shouldn’t we assume that it is also racism that induces them to smoke, eat unhealthy food, and neglect exercise? If the latter inference makes no sense, why should we assume that the former holds true based on anecdotal evidence? There is another difficulty in blaming such contradictions primarily on racism. Let’s ask whether, if we could eliminate all racial prejudice, those problems would disappear? It seems unlikely. What we need is a paradigm that looks less to the excoriation of our sins and more to the redemption of a new life. What is needed is an initiative like the labor unions that united the people in a shared purpose or perhaps the CCC of the Depression years. That’s easier said than done.

On Friday morning, I again drive down to Shawnee Community College. Back to its quasi monastic atmosphere of quiet learning. I’m expecting to see several people but have arrived early. In the library, I’m pleased to notice on the shelf Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment and some older but still useful studies of Spinoza. I sit down with them to kill time. Precisely because this is not the time or place to immerse myself in Spinoza’s Amsterdam of refugees, dissenters, and philosophers, the city rises up all the more vividly in my mind. I walked those streets with Veronika soon after we met. They’re overlaid in my mind with the Existentialist Amsterdam of Camus’s The Fall, overlaid also with accounts of the seventeenth-century Dutch Collegiants who maintained a miraculously open society which supported heretics and hounded refugees in the midst of intolerance and hatred—an underground that allowed the philosophy of Spinoza to be born. If anything at all, Amsterdam means drugs and sex to young people now. Now blots out the deep past. Archeologists can only reconstruct it by way of these books.

I’m reminded of my project of writing a response to Israel’s final volume in his Radical Enlightenment project: The Enlightenment that Failed. My plan is to discuss Lessing’s little treatise of 1780, The Education of Humankind, as the point of separation between three formerly compatible strands of opposition: the older religious rebellion of dissenters against authority, the radical philosophical revolution of Spinoza, and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century movements that began with Hegel and Marx and eventually separated the trained intellectuals from reflective non-intellectuals and the atheists from the believers, like some impenetrable hedge of vines and thorns. On one side nothing but jargon and theory, on the other our orphaned common sense. Exploitation, for example. Every derelict on the street gets it. The system is rigged to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. But try to read an article of oppositional theory by a leftist academic! You’ll need advanced degrees in three or four disciplines. We academics can only converse with ourselves.

I’m reading a commentary on Spinoza’s Ethics. Has anyone else here ever bestowed attention on these orphaned books? I feel forlorn and out of place, like an archeologist who’s discovered the testimony of a vanished culture in a Walmart parking lot. Could these earnest farm kids who aspire to become nurses or agronomists ever find their way into these books or breathe their alien mental atmosphere? As if in answer, I feel that someone is watching me from one of the other library tables, someone who is curious about my absorbed attention. I’m sure of it. But when I glance up, all the heads are down. A kiosk displays the colorful bindings of the Oxford Very Short Introduction series. I could imagine some alert, curious young person reading about philosophy and getting interested in Spinoza. I thrived on the air of those books at their age. Why shouldn’t those sparks still glow in the Egyptian darkness?

At eleven, I expect to meet with Mildred, but other things have come up for her. I chat with the young English instructor from Anna, then briefly with Mildred, who is both apologetic and irritated with me, and finally with the life science instructor Tony Gerard. Instead of starting with my usual explanation of my interest, I notice a poster in his office with timber rattlers and ask if there are still any in Southern Illinois. He explains how they have nearly all been eradicated. The females carry their eggs in their bodies until they hatch, which makes the pregnant females more likely to lie exposed in the sun, vulnerable to the hikers or farmers who kill them on sight. The few remaining dens are all male. I tell him how I once sighted a big animal from my hunting stand that I considered almost certainly a wolf, since it was far too large for a coyote. He explains that, since coyotes, dogs, and wolves can interbreed, many sizes and mixes are possible. Identification requires genetic testing. We talk about the cypresses of Southern Illinois, the trees that helped make us Egypt. There are some giant cypresses nearby. I ask for directions. He explains the criteria for assessing the size of trees, and how the cypresses have root systems that expand so much near the ground that their height is limited.

Then he tells me about his attempted campaign against fracking in Johnson County. The newspaper owner in the county seat of Vienna was in favor of it and banned editorials or letters to the editor that criticized it, so Tony launched a Facebook and word-of-mouth counter campaign. He shows me his Facebook appeal. In it he explains how the companies that purchase mineral rights can subvert property ownership by drilling in at an angle; how the chemicals used in fracking are suspiciously kept as a “trade secret”; and how the resultant earth tremors that are serious enough elsewhere might have a different magnitude on the fault line which once caused the colossal New Madrid earthquake. Tony’s ballot initiative failed, possibly because of its ambiguous wording. The price of oil dropped, resulting in the fracking operation being tabled. The threat still hangs over the county. I notice that his face in the video was far more youthful, rounded, and cheerful. Now he’s haggard and ageing. Yet he tells me that after having been married to “the wrong woman,” he is happy at last, with his new wife and young child. He would be pleased if I joined one of his nature walks in March.

Grateful for this openness, I thank him and tell him that I’m not only interested in these things for their own sake but also because I’m searching out the networks of intellectuals that exist beyond the purview of the university. Now I tell this to everyone I meet. It feels good to be frank. But I doubt it’s a good idea. I’m beginning to notice something about my contacts. When we talk, there’s a mutual warmth, even gratitude for my curiosity, but as soon as I’m gone, the chill of darkness sets in. A pall of suspicion taints our email communications. When we talk, they see me as one of them. Then my interest in the Southern Illinois equivalent of the Russian intelligentsia starts to seem weird. It is weird. They crave attention. Don’t we all. They want to be seen. Other people’s attention makes us feel real to ourselves. But people shrink from the strange off-color spotlight my curiosity shines on them. My off-key casting into an unfamiliar scenario makes them wary. We’re instinctively terrified when we see our reflection in the strange gaze of another. Is that what I should be, what I perhaps am? We prefer to look through our glasses darkly. Projecting how we are seen, rightly or wrongly, rips the veil of illusion and poisons our self-esteem like the killer eye of the basilisk. I can feel it too. I feel that basilisk gaze.

Once, I made the mistake of telling what I thought were amusing stories about encountering elsewhere someone from Southern Illinois: in one case a graduate student, in another an author whose book I read and then realized that she was my age and from a neighboring town. In both cases, I took pleasure in announcing that we were from the same place, only to notice their chagrin. They thought they had escaped to a new and better life, and here was someone who saw through them, someone who knew we were just clods caught out in ill-fitting finery. Telling those stories recently, I laughed and mimicked the dismay of those escaped paisanos. My conversation partners didn’t share my amusement. Theywere the ones who hadn’t escaped, the ones stuck in dismal non-entity! I was holding up a mirror to them.

On Tony’s recommendation, I drive to a lunch place in nearby Karnak, another of the Egyptian names like Thebes, Cairo, or Carmi, another tiny place with a state road for its main street and an old fortress-like Methodist Church presiding over the empty storefronts. It’s easy to find “Our Place.” It’s located in one of the storefronts. Since it’s Friday, they offer a well-attended buffet, everything home-made. I order soup and the salad bar on the waitress’s recommendation. It’s a family place. Everyone is familiar and knows everyone else. The waitress, an older woman who also cooks, isn’t sure at first how to take me, but when I ask if I got it right in reconstructing the recipe for her homemade soup—a successful cross between chili and cabbage stew—she runs through it for me and tells me with a trace of smile to come back again. As in Galatia and other small places I’ve stopped in, there are no chain restaurants here. It makes the meal slightly more expensive, but what are the congeniality and attentiveness worth? It’s impossible for me to feel like a “guest” in a McDonald’s or to feel any other way here.

I drive north on a state road and find the scenic spot where I can park, get out, and have a look at the giant cypress trees. The ground all around this empty raised parking space is flooded. I can only take a few steps to get closer to the monster trees. Their root system is enlarged so that at their base they are like islands supporting a towering mast. The larger of the two tallest ones leans at an angle higher up. These survivors have lost lower branches, then spread their crowns above the other trees. No tree is an island. They suffer all the depredations that beset their environment. As I contemplate them, I feel as if I’m hearing faint voices. I’m not sure whether it’s an illusion or a far-away crowd. There are splashing sounds and the rising and falling pitch that signals hectic activity, prolonged excitement, or danger. No dry path lets me get closer. I stand for a long time hoping the sound will grow audible and its sources visible. I’ve heard something about “rinn-ecters,” reenactors of Civil War battles and young people from elsewhere who act out the terrors and ordeals of slaves fleeing northward, coached and guided along a make-believe Underground Railroad. Could that be the source? The hubbub continues with slumps and surges. It’s not the pattern of play or work. This isn’t hunting season and hunters are never loud until they fire. No shots are fired. No motors roar. No trees or branches crash.

A nearby backroad promises to lead to a nature preserve, but it turns to gravel and loses itself between rutted driveways and access ways to the houses and mobile homes of the rural poor. I turn back and stop at a modest but broad brick building. It must have been a country two-room schoolhouse with a bell tower and an expanded entrance which would have housed coat rooms for pupils arriving on foot, wrapped up against rain and winter. Some windows are boarded up with blackened plywood. Others still have their panes intact. Inside are shelves of books and low tables with opened magazines and books spread out. You can see that the patched roof has been leaking into pots on the floor, but the building is evidently still in use, no doubt by the ghosts of children long since grown and deceased.

I drive on northward on the Belknap Road. This is deep country, L’Égypte profonde, as the French might say. I come to a valley gently rimmed with wooded hills, the sort of place that might have drawn early settlers who thought they could invent their own little world. On the high ground to one side is a small village, well-kept but like so many places here uncanny in its absence of people or of evidence that the houses are inhabited. It’s an Eden without humans. A tiny wooden Methodist church stands at the crossroads. It has narrow, gothic arched windows and a tiny steeple. Is it filled with worshipers raising their voices in praise of a Divine Providence that led them to this simulacrum of paradise? I remember how once on a hunting trip in Marion County I passed a country church on a dark Thursday night in November. The parking lot was full. The gothic windows radiated golden light. I inquired and learned that the rural church was rented out on Thursday nights for drug rehabilitation meetings. Recovery is evidently the new revivalism. The ecstasies which the pioneers found in bootleg whisky or improvised religion are sought now in designer drugs. Recovery is conversion to a rival ascetic sect. Some are born again to disciplined acquisition and sanctimonious respectability. Does anyone look for the neglected path to enlightenment, the secret valley within us?

I drive to the outskirts of Vienna, county seat of Johnson County. I’ve been here before. When you arrive from the west, the town pops up without transition, as if it had once been surrounded by a wall. I’ve heard about the former black population having been expelled in the middle of the last century. There is a regular little town square with its old courthouse and on one side a steep stone stair leading up to the 1910 Carnegie Library. I’ve asked there before about materials on the history of the place. There was nothing worth consulting. I had asked whether the town had ever had resources of coal or oil. I was told by a librarian with a thick southern accent that it had always been poor. I ate dinner at a café on the outskirts where a young waitress spoke a language I couldn’t identify. It was Albanian. Her family is from Macedonia. Interesting—but I couldn’t reach the threshold of confidence to make it feasible to ask about the darker chapters of Vienna’s history, the suppressed opposition to fracking or shameful race relations.

This time I have the name of someone who works for the Shawnee Community College Extension in the Vienna High School. I find the school on the outskirts and buzz to ask for admittance. The office help accompanies me down corridors lined with lockers past a basketball court and a luncheon area where teams of some sort are lined up for drill. If the community college campuses at SIC or Shawnee remind me of monastic retreats voluntarily secluded from the world, the association that overwhelms me here is that of the prison. The heavy coats of industrial-smelling paint, the controlled movements, omnipresent school colors, loudspeakers, locked entrance, and glib indoctrination give the impression that everyone is groaning under the law rather than finding their way in freedom. Some conform and become high school celebrities. Others serve their sentences and leave, bearing scars from the ordeal.

I’m reminded of Rob Woolridge’s successful use of the “battle royal” episode from Ellison’s Invisible Man at Shawnee. Assuming that his class was partly or mostly white students fresh out of high school, I know now why that surreal scenario worked for them. Think: adolescents whose mental abilities are wasted, who are first aroused by naked girls and then driven to duel one another like gladiator clowns to the point of blood and tears, all beneath the lewd gaze of depraved older men. This is not only the experience of black youth. To some degree, it’s the universal high school experience in America. Only in America is intellectuality mocked that way. No other nation does this unless they’ve copied it from us. The battle royal is the infantile spectacle of football, put on for degenerate older males who are no longer capable, if ever they were, of optimal use of their bodies, and never tempted to test their minds. The naked girls are the cheerleaders. The black experience is the universal American experience, only blatantly more so. If white racists are repulsed by the physicality of young black men, it’s because the spectacle of our latent contests and humiliations is a deep source of terror and self-loathing. If I wanted to claim a place for my kind in the great American whineocracy of the disrespected, I would look back to my high school years as an alienated intellectual, surrounded by the imbecile worshippers in the cult of pure competition for its own sake: the shoulder-padded, helmeted martyr-aggressors of the rite of American football with our whole sordid religion of team sports. That’s our version of the banality, the glib cover up of thoughtless brutal cruelty, the Chekhovian poshlost’ that oppresses protagonists of late nineteenth-century Russian literature.

In the rear, we come to the office of the community college representative. The representative was born and has lived in Vienna all her life. I had hoped that she might be open about the character and history of her town; but she misapprehends my curiosity as interest in moving here. I get the standard realtor’s and booster’s spiel about what a safe and friendly place it is. While I’m thinking how to shift directions, a gangly but sensitive-looking teenager knocks on the door, enters, and is told to wait his turn. Next his mother knocks and comes in, and it seems that she and the representative are friends. I realize that I might as well excuse myself and leave. The mother, a pleasant person, is a policewoman reminiscent of the pregnant Francis McDormand in the movie Fargo. She might be the source I need; but she is here to speak with the Shawnee College representative about her gangly, sensitive boy. There is no way to initiate the conversation I want. I leave and drive to the town square, park, take a photo of the old courthouse, and then drive back to Carbondale.

Back in Carbondale, I check into my regular hotel on the outskirts. Never any need to reserve. The decline in SIU enrollments leaves hotels vacant, restaurants empty, and shopping centers like this one across from my hotel deserted, with only occasional knots of teenagers strolling past mall shops where attendants idle between the unsold merchandise. It was a bad idea to build so many of these malls. I’ve read that what it costs to build and maintain their infrastructure outweighs any tax gains; but much like the earliest settlers and river town speculators, their promoters preached the gospel of “Build it and they shall come,” the gospel of limitless growth, based on the lurid vision of each of us conning our neighbor in perpetuity, as if society were a perpetual motion machine that runs by consuming its own human substance.

I have been wandering Little Egypt as if I were a character out of Chekhov, an obsessive like Lihachev in “On the Road,” driven clear to the barren steppes in search of truth and meaning. But Carbondale is no Yekaterinburg or Irkutsk of exiled Decembrist revolutionaries. Before repairing to my habitual bar, I drive up and down the streets, past my squalid summer quarters, past the Italian Village with its silly “Leaning Tower of Pizza” topped by partying dummies that perpetuate the dim-witted joke. Past the Tri-Towers, built for a student population that has shrunk to a third of what was projected. The towers are empty, dark and abandoned, like the remains of the port city which Cairo never became, like the empty store fronts in Mill Shoals where tattered curtains flap in the wind through the paneless windows, signs of a defeat to which homicidal time won’t grant even the dignity of a formal surrender. It does all have something deeply Chekhovian. Noticing this does no one any good, least of all me.

In the evening, I repair to my habitual bar and its propitious acoustics. Now I know why I arouse their suspicion. I’ve never properly introduced myself or shown much interest in them because I perceived myself as an outsider and noticed their preference for their regulars. This time I insist on getting to know them better. I talk to the proprietress. She is just back from a tour of Europe which included Salzburg where she ate at an ancient monastery that I know from a recent conference there. A Mozart and opera enthusiast, she adores Salzburg. As a student in nearby Murray State in Kentucky, she came here to do her practice teaching, hated it, went to restaurant school in New York City, and returned to open her place in an old shotgun storefront with its stamped tin ceilings. I wonder how it’s possible to do so much cooking when the kitchen is nothing but a partitioned area in a narrow space typical of old small-town stores. I’m invited back to the kitchen. Her partner assures me that everything is fresh, prepared early, so that the cooks only have to get it out of the refrigerator and finish it on the industrial-model range. The two then spend the evening socializing with their guests many of whom are habitual ageing hipsters and erstwhile revolutionaries nursing their illusions, not unlike me in fact. This is so much my place that I suddenly feel dizzy and disoriented here.

The proprietors point out another guest who they say knows me. At a corner table sits a round-faced, round-shouldered guy, perhaps forty, perhaps older, who nods and raises his glass. I’m not in the mood to meet someone else right now, but the situation demands it. “We know the same people,” this innocuous looking guy tells me. He is younger, but I can’t place him. Before I ask who we both know, he annoys me by asking: “I heard you been in those lower counties, Hardin, right? See anything interesting?” It seems that he, too, is collecting material for a book. I tell him about my travels through Pulaski and Johnson counties, my inability to get behind appearances in Vienna, and about the crowd noises I heard in the cypress swamp. “You sure heard something,” he tells me, as if he were the curator of the invisible Egypt, “Could a been a lot a things. Could a been the reenactors. Could a been the real thing.” What does he mean by “the real thing”? Slipping into the fantastic, he explains: “There’s an underground railroad for the border-crossers who tend the organic farms; and there’s armed gangs that goes after ‘em. Nobody reports it.” I’m wondering about his sanity. I have an unpleasant sense of being mocked, of realizing that what I thought made me special is actually a crowd phenomenon which I’ve picked up late without knowing it. Does what he’s saying make less sense than my ideas? I remember this guy when I first met him as loner living with his mom. Now he effects a country accent and utters self-important hints of conspiracies he’s privy to. There is something unsettling about him.

We introduce ourselves but I immediately forget his name. I make an excuse, call for the check and dig in my pockets for my car key. “I’ll take care your drink,” he says, “Nice meetin’ ya.” He adds cryptically, “Herod’s up soon. Watch for signs with ‘E.I.R.A.’ and a symbol like this.” With his jabbing finger, he traces three sharp peaks, evidently the trademark of some rock band he’s into. I thank him and leave, utterly disconcerted. The village of Herod was in my sights as the location of the College in the Hills. Hearing the name just now was like a code word from the devil’s own mouth. Herod!

I always park on the street in front. To avoid getting shunted into one-way streets that take me several blocks out of my way, I usually make an illegal U-turn and head back to my hotel the direct way. Just before turning, I glance back at the storefront windows and see that this fellow is in conversation with a man seated with his back to me, someone who from behind looks startlingly like my brother. This distracts me. I start to turn into the path of a car careening up from behind. The car which would have struck the driver’s-side door honks and we brake. The patrons are now staring out at me. I twist my neck to make sure the path is clear and then go ahead with my ill-advised U-turn as quickly as possible.

The next morning, I attend a presentation at John A. Logan where I expect to meet Darrel Dexter, an historian of Southern Illinois and an exemplary member of what I call the regional intelligentsia. The presentation makes use of his research on Southern Illinois slavery and its opponents. Among the first white settlers in Union County was a group of Swiss German Anabaptists who came to the region to distance themselves from slave holders in Kentucky. The speaker, a friend of Dexter’s, comes dressed in the garb of an early German settler with a long rifle he’s crafted for authenticity. This is the sort of thing that might be smiled at in academic circles, but it’s effective. He begins by speaking a few words in what he assumes to be the Swiss German dialect of Abram Hunsaker. When he switches to English, the outline of his talk is credible and well-informed, though like everyone he probably overemphasizes the importance of the ceremony of baptizing three times face forward in a real body of water, which gave them their name as Dunkards or Dunkers. Ceremonies are placeholders for deeper convictions. I’m impressed by the size of the audience, forty people, and their avidity; but I’m slightly disappointed that a third of them evidently came because they trace some kinship to the families in question, as if we could only trace our affinities by blood, not by principles or ideas.

After the presentation, I go for coffee with Darrel. If I had him pegged as a D.A.R./S.A.R. type, I had it wrong. He’s a student of the late SIU historian John Y. Simon, known as the editor of U.S. Grant’s papers. Simon also did research on Southern Illinois, especially Cairo, which was Grant’s headquarters. Simon was one of the many who took on the project of helping the declining city. Darrel works with documents and concentrates on this region but is ignored by the SIU History Department. His Bondage in Egypt is a better history of slavery in Southern Illinois than another recent book I’ve read. I tell him Mildred’s story, and how surprised I was that she is convinced that the Freemasons helped her father resettle in Olmsted. According to Darrel, there were black and white parallel Masonic organizations. There may have been connections through which assistance flowed even in those times. I learn that Darrel knows Gerard. He had Tony’s mother as a high school teacher and his father as a professor. Individualists and outsiders have root systems that link them to others in a subterranean web.

Perhaps we do have our equivalent of the Decembrists’ secret networks. Perhaps the threads are only dormant. Bondage in Egypt records the varied nuances of anti-slavery sentiment among Southern Illinois Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers. It seems that Hunsaker and his Baptist brethren worked with a black man named Absalom who had been sent to labor in his master’s stead. Toiling at close quarters forged a bond and brought it home to them (as they wrote in the deed of emancipation they purchased for Absalom), “that it is contrary to the privileges that man enjoys from his creator that he should become the slave of his creatures subject to dominion and control without receiving for his labor a just and equitable compensation” (Bondage in Egypt: Slavery in Southern Illinois. [Cape Girardeau: Center for Regional History Southeast Missouri State U., 2011], p. 200). The language of “creator” and “creatures” is theological; “dominion and control” is political; however, “receiving a just and equitable compensation” for labor performed is the language of workplace justice. No wonder whites and blacks weren’t allowed to work alongside one another. Darrel remembers as a child in Cairo the fear sown by the violence of the 60s and 70s. He is planning to write a book on the Ku Klux Klan in Southern Illinois. I encourage him. It might help heal our wounds and allow us to grow into one.

In the afternoon, I meet briefly with a poet who goes by the name of jacob erin-cilberto or just “Fog.” Originally from the Bronx, he came to SIU Carbondale only a few years after I was here. He stayed, writing an M.A. thesis on poetry at the university and becoming a lifelong poet whose main theme is his loves. I’m charmed by this. He is an alternative version of me. Back then, hardly anyone dared to become a writer. I felt honored to know June’s husband, David Wiley, who was serious about writing. The three of us hung out together in the French Quarter in the summer of 1967, listening to the LP of Monteverdi that I had brought for June and talking about Rilke, Joyce, and the Beats. Fog is a poet of one theme: love preoccupies him and subordinates his language and art in a direct, immediate sense, as in his poem “inkling” with its word play on the old technology of pen and ink and cursive writing:

write me a perpetual letter
don’t sign it,

ever

just keep the cursive lines straight,
no lies,
just the truth of love

just let me catch the scent of you on the pages
I will fold them neatly
as I fold your feelings
within my heart

I will read you forever
if you write me a perpetual letter
don’t sign it,

don’t give me conclusion

ever.

Love perpetuates itself as a kind of eternal foreplay of language, a word play that celebrates love and the beloved, but is neither concrete nor even intensely erotic. Fog orbits around the beloved without quite landing, without reclaiming or settling on the eclipsed planet of his love. It makes good sense. He reminds me of the Beats, of Ferlinghetti. I comment to him that in our youth popular culture was full of songs of love. Many were sentimental kitsch, but they were sung and listened to because they expressed the feelings of youth. Now such songs are rarely heard. I have noticed that nowadays you rarely see young people getting passionate in public or even holding hands—a common sight in the Sixties or Seventies when the practical definition of being in love was not giving a damn what anyone thought. Love used to be the wild card in the pack. Now every variety of love gets inspected, classified, and accredited—or not. To love now means belonging to an oppressed or oppressing group. But can love still be love when it has to pass inspection and fit into some ideologically defined group identity?

The mental picture I had of Fog from the author’s photo in one of his recent books was that of a puckishly rounded figure with a face encircled by a head of full white beard and hair, with something of the eternal child in harmony with himself but tinged with sadness and resignation. Sitting across from him at the Longbranch, I notice that his features are not rounded but sharp and hawk-like. So, Fog is an odd bird, forever circling his habitat as it gets colder, harsher, and less inviting. I admire his faithfulness and recognize the place he occupies in the intelligentsia. He is appreciated by David and Angie and admired by Chastady, the librarian of Galatia who designed the cover of the book that Fog presents me with, pour me another poem, please. Like him, I am coping with impending decline and death by expanding upon lifelong obsessions. Fog takes more satisfaction than I can, however, that the pop songs of our youth are still sung while recent music is heard and forgotten. I’m not sure he is pleased to receive my attention. Sympathy holds up a mirror to us. A little empathy can be devastating.

I’ve heard from Angie and David that Fog aborted a job application at John A. Logan by forgetting the name of the interviewing supervisor. He tells me himself that he has always liked working at Pag’s, a pizza place which has been in Carbondale as long as he has. I can imagine his camaraderie with his fellow workers, his flirtations with customers, and the occasional inspirations for poems. It’s a life that has no reason to apologize or sell itself short, but I hear that the neglect of his true love brought about the end of his marriage—but not the end of his true love.

Fog doesn’t quite know how to take me. He doesn’t understand that my admiration is entirely without irony. I tell him that I’m resolved to follow his example and become a servant of “the truth of love.” He also doesn’t know that I see him and the others I’m meeting here as my doubles. This is true of Dexter with his roots in his home region. It’s true of David, Robbie, Mildred, Kathy, and many others besides. Is it true of the stranger I met just before I nearly drove into an oncoming vehicle?

On the way north, when I turn from route 13 onto I-57 while hazarding the construction zone between West Frankfort and Benton, or when I-57 merges with I-64 and then branches north again, I imagine that I’m navigating a labyrinth of existential interstate highways with offramps to non-existence. An overpass catches my eye in passing and dominates my reveries all the way home. All other overpass-supporting columns on the interstate are barricaded with the large round obstacles placed at an angle to block cars whose drivers might opt out of existence the only sure way to avoid the appearance of suicide yet guarantee an instant death. Due to the construction, this open rampart is unbarricaded. I realize that I’ve noticed this before and reflected that a brief text message to my wife to the effect that I’m sleepy but will be home late would conceal the truth and solve all my problems with one fell crash. Haunted by thoughts of all the close calls I’ve had in life and all the alternate existences I might have lived yet comforted by the preferability of the one that I did live, I race northward, home to my wife and son. When I arrive, all the lights in the house are turned off. The effect is dismal, and I decide to postpone or forego further research in Southern Illinois and not leave my family again. Otherwise, I’ll become a stranger in my family and home.

5. Homage to Oblivion

You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? . . . Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth?
(Gal 3:1, 4:16)

Now I’m back in Bloomington, where my wife and son haven’t spoken to me more than the minimal necessary words in eight months. Not since I made it clear that I believed their dietary regimen might be causing her to lose a dangerous amount of weight. I’m in the worst of all possible double binds: my presence is a burden, my absence a betrayal. I’m determined to walk a narrow tightrope. I will stay here, but keep out of their way. Any plea from me for conciliation, much less protest, is a provocation; any complaint, or even silence, is declared “passive aggressive.” My plan calls for focusing on research and writing early every day, swimming at the YMCA in the late afternoon, dinner at a supermarket in the evening, a drink next door, then readings in French and Russian (to maintain my waning powers of retention), a film or series before turning in (viewed upstairs where I won’t bother them), and finally a good night’s sleep. The last is the most important but most difficult item on my schedule.

I have disturbing dreams in which the various periods and settings of my life get mixed up or become weird. More often my dreams are in dialog with things I’ve done recently. For years, I had a recurrent nightmare in which I found myself either inexplicably out of a job (sometimes I had absent-mindedly quit mine) or (often as a result), I was back in my grad student years, working on a degree and hoping against hope to find an academic position. The grotesque and disturbing aspect of this dream was that I was a student again but at my advanced age! To my horror, it dawns on me that I tried to make this nightmare come true. I had the catastrophically bad idea of applying as a non-traditional student to a master’s degree program in creative writing at SIU. I thought it would do me good to take seminars and have more human contact. The SIU English Department would need me as a student. Then I realized how awkward this would be: what I had in mind was nothing less than the actualization of a recurrent nightmare. I was trying to enter the world of my recurrent dreams. During my waking hours and studies, there are ecstatic epiphanies in which I am certain that I’ve resolved world-historical quandaries by means of an intuition sharpened by a lifetime of literary studies. Strange as it sounds, I think that I really have made such discoveries, though I am equally confident that no one will listen.

Almost simultaneously with these ecstasies, I’m entertaining constant thoughts of suicide. I don’t want to say that I’m seriously contemplating it; but I am imagining the act in obsessive detail. It would need to be instant, a shotgun blast that obliterates my brain and exits the top of my skull. My first concern is the problem of soiling my beautiful attic study with blood and gore. I would position myself leaning outward on the edge of my Danish-made balcony-like opened skylight. The shot aimed upward would not endanger any bystander or neighbor and not damage the irreplaceable glass. To protect the walls and floor, I would tape down thick layers of newspaper and plastic, anticipating the gory splatter. Since I can’t countenance the thought of my lifeless head recoiling and smashing down onto the tiled floor (somehow I imagine that this lifeless thud would be the most terrible aspect for my loved ones: if they were downstairs and heard it, it would echo in their ears for the rest of their lives), I would position expendable bedding from an old down comforter and pillow. Somehow it seems to me that my wife might prefer to find me so to speak “tucked in.” But it’s the thought of the terrible burden they would have to carry with them through life that prevents me from taking that final well-planned step.

My only defensive strategy is to concentrate on the sort of projects that I’ve always worked on. I have removed all implements of death from my household: my shotgun, crossbow, the razor-sharp hunting knives are already in the trunk of my car. Once I’m back on an even keel, I’ll make one last trip south to deposit the equipment at Rick’s house. Then I’ll accumulate enough material to finish this project somehow, so that I don’t have to leave my family ever again in order to get the sense of closure that I crave. I’ve been trying to cheer myself up by reading David Sedaris. He has the rare ability to make me laugh out loud. I sit in the living room and read to myself, laughing hysterically and hoping that my wife and son will get curious and ask what I’m reading. Instead they leave the room.

Since I enjoy reading diaries that cover the years of my life experience (Annie Ernaux’s Les Années, The Years, is a classic), I checked out of the city library Sedaris’s Theft by Finding: Diaries, 1977-2002. It’s the uplifting narrative of his ascent from the obscurity of Raleigh, North Carolina, via Chicago and New York, to live in Paris and enjoy an international reputation. What dismayed me was his perceptions of the people who do not rise. At first, I was struck that in his description the common crowd in Chicago or New York is every bit as loutish, vulgar, and aggressive as stereotypical rural folk. Then I noticed the real pattern. The coarse stupidity he witnesses everywhere is grist for his comic imagination: these crude, shiftless, faithless specimens are fuel for the comedic combustion that propels Sedaris upward on the cultural and social scale. They are almost all sordid, these human specimens he’s escaping from. In order to research the welfare system for a play in progress, he visits a welfare office in New York City. The human spectacle he witnesses could be found in almost any part of his diaries: “A woman with braids left the line every so often to spit in the trash can. A grown man suckled a pacifier and dribbled saliva all over his hands. He would lift his shirt, walk in a circle, then stare at the wall as if it were a mirror and laugh. It felt wrong to be there” (314).

When Sedaris was doing research for his play, he didn’t even take the opportunity to talk to the people he observed in the welfare office: “People seemed to know each other. They socialized. So much time spent waiting” (314). These human specimens are his grotesque and colorful stepping-stones. They are only useful viewed from an ironic distance. Comedy is harnessed to his drive to climb the ladder from the provincial to the urban, from the vulgar to the cultivated. Sedaris makes me laugh, but in re-reading “A friend in the ghetto” about his adolescent “friendship” with an overweight black girl, I cringed. He’s at his best re-inventing and inhabiting his human specimens. He reveals his hand as a thoughtful climber of the social ladder. Look at me, his tone announces, we are all doing this, all viewing the dregs from a safe distance, thankful that we’re not among them. Let’s be frank about it. He isn’t wrong, but I wish he could tell us something about the lives of those who spit in trash cans, drool, laugh to themselves, and deliver speeches to the walls. I can’t help seeing myself in them. As with many of the dispossessed and humiliated, my wretchedness goes hand in hand with a Nietzschean grandiosity. I understand the lunatic who gives speeches to the walls.

Far superior for illuminating the intimate sphere of the homeless and wretched is the French feminist author Virginie Despentes. I am slowly savoring her trilogy of the bankrupt vinyl record store hipster-owner Vernon Subutex, who, after being reduced to destitution, first sponges off his friends and then settles into a life on the streets, begging, sleeping in construction sites, and finding companionship among the misfits and SDF (sans domicile fixe). Unlike Sedaris, Despentes humanizes the humiliated, the passionate individualism of the proud anarchist Olga, the solicitious tenderness of the old clochard Charles, and the deep numbing mortal injury of Sélim, the Maghrebien-French intellectual whose wife has left him to become a porn star and whose beloved daughter Aïcha converts to Islam, takes the hijab, and keeps her distance from her doting infidel father. You get to know them well; you experience their sufferings from within. They are, as it were, “heroes for our time.”

I’m ghosting my lectures in the privacy of my study. With only the techniques of a scholar of literature, I’ve penetrated the inner life of authors who by their writings altered the course of history and changed the way we see the world. The typical error made by us readers and scholars has always been to begin with the gnomic wisdom of those geniuses and then imagine their inner life as a rocketing trajectory to stars glittering beyond the reach of mortal minds. My late-career epiphany is seeing it the other way around. Nietzsche started as just one more academic striver who did his homework and made it onto the fast track, only to feel unfulfilled when he made it. Post-tenure remorse is the ultimate buyer’s remorse because it’s cost us our souls. Unlike, say, Spinoza, who was never on any academic track, the German classicist Nietzsche did what any graduate student or junior professor secretly longs to do. He quit his job and lived the free life of the mind. Where his genius differed was in creating a poetic myth to celebrate his dropping out. He reinvented himself in the personae of the solitary mountain climber, the prophet, Columbus. Every academic intellectual secretly longs to climb prophetic heights and cross dark seas. The key is finding some new field of study or game-changing theory. Nietzsche amazes academic drones like us because he recasts our sedentary mental drudge as a kind of heroism. He transcends our veneration and understanding, so that we turn him into a brilliant comet and lone wolf. He knew what it took to beguile us! But I have him figured out. I’ve nailed Nietzsche.

Then there is Kierkegaard. For years my friends have been urging me to read him. There seems to be no doubt about his stature as a prophet of the modern world. In my current state of mind in which I imagine that I can see through failed prophets, I’m not having any of it. His tricks are all too obvious. Here he is on the subject of despair in his Sickness unto Death: “Despair is not only dialectically different from a sickness, but also its symptoms are dialectical, and therefore the superficial view is very easily deceived in determining whether or not despair is present. Not to be in despair can in fact signify to be in despair” (XI, 139). Note the incantatory use of the seductive word dialectical, a magic trick for the disenchanted. You think you are ok; but dialectically Kierkegaard knows better. You think you stand on principle. Dialectically Marx knows you’re only defending your class interests. You suppose that you are rising up against injustice. The dialectic of Freudian psychoanalysis reveals that you’re merely acting out the murder of your father. Try arguing with any of that.

What I find most repulsive about Kierkegaard is his self-congratulatory preciosity. Why this category of “the aesthetic”? It should encompass the selfishness and hedonism of those who have not attained the higher level of the “ethical,” let alone the true Christian state of mind which Kierkegaard preaches. Would it make sense to call those who wallow in vulgar self-gratification “aesthetic”? Obviously, the category was intended for someone like Kierkegaard himself, a refined and educated gentleman. This is how he blends self-criticism with self-congratulation. And what about the “ethical”? Does that apply as well to maudlin, tasteless goodness? If you’re tempted to reply that whatever is truly ethical or truly Christian ipso facto cannot be maudlin and tasteless, then you’ve given his secret away: the framework of his critique is really “aesthetic,” which is why it has exercised such an attraction on the sophisticated modern reader. Kierkegaard is an intellectual dandy whose self-flagellation is too elegant for my taste.

Where he really stinks is in a work with the alluring title, Works of Love. Where do any real works of love make their appearance in this precious little intellectual exercise? Schopenhauer, who was neither a Christian nor a very nice man, was far better at characterizing selflessness. Here is Kierkegaard as he comes closest to uttering an honest word on the subject: “If, then, you should see the beggar—perhaps in your sorrow over him suffering more than he—you would see in him the inner glory, the equality of the glory, that his wretched outer garment conceals” (IX 87). Notice the little parenthesis of moral self-congratulation that Kierkegaard inserts while assigning the beggar a role in his buffoonish theater of introspection. Heavenly thanks, Søren! Do allow those who hunger and suffer for your edification to join you in heartily congratulating you!

And as for the whole sorry business with Regine Olson, whom Kierkegaard not only jilted but typically cast for a supporting role in the tale of his own Christian self-abnegation, I would like to imagine what his fellow Christian (but more humanly versed) contemporary Dostoyevsky might have said about this sorry affair: Isn’t it obvious that he didn’t want her for the sordid reasons men and women reject lovers in my novels? Dostoyevsky studied human nature among the thieves and murderers of a Siberian prison. The Danish dandy Kierkegaard, unable to extricate himself from an engagement he no longer desired, commuted back and forth to and from Berlin and turned the sow’s ear of his aborted betrothal into the silk purse of an elegantly tormented conscience. The intellectuals who are hypnotized by his twists and turns are blind to the authorial vanity which motivates all of us scribblers. That’s what the dialectic does for us!

Now I’m back at work on my project of a critique of the final volume of Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment project. His final volume bears the title The Enlightenment that Failed, reminiscent of the anti-communist anthology The God that Failed. When I defended Israel’s first volume, I demonstrated the continuity between the established historical phenomenon of the Radical Reformation of heretics and dissenters and Israel’s Radical Enlightenment centered on Spinoza. I suppose that deep down I was attempting to reconcile the antitheses of my life. The Jewish apostate Spinoza was supported and facilitated by radical Protestants in the Collegiants’ movement. Their roots went back to Dutch, Polish, and German dissenters who were hardly different from the German Baptists in Southern Illinois. They took religious freedom and autonomous thought to their ultimate conclusion. In the 1670s, this meant Spinoza’s philosophical monism which was free of all dogma but not hostile to any religion.

Something deep, ancient, and spectral is being reborn in my feverish mind, something archetypal that lies behind all the clandestine movements from the Rosicrucians and Freemasons to the Decembrists and Beatniks: the unbroken thread of a creative dissent which never dies out but is always revived in some provincial corner of empire. At rare moments, it erupts in recurrent renaissances, reformations, and revolutions. Usually, it molders, germinates, or lies dormant in forgotten libraries or obscure cafés. The same rigorous spiritual emancipation which had led Luther to rebel against Rome and Anabaptists against Luther found its consistent extension in Spinoza’s Ethics, a work that embraces non-oppression and enlightened love. Israel’s subsequent volumes trace that influence through the eighteenth and into the early nineteenth century. The last volume extends to the young Marx. For Israel, these are the long shadows of the Spinozist Enlightenment. Then comes the break. Developed Marxism or Communism becomes for Israel “the Enlightenment that Failed”: no longer democratic, no longer dedicated to the belief that education alone can change the world. The world is divided into the Elect and the Damned. The line of division is social class, property ownership, the relation to the means of production.

Some months back, I corresponded with Israel and asked him how he would deal with the following problem: If Spinoza’s influence lies in secularization and philosophical monism, and if that influence can be traced to the early Marx, why did Communism not realize the Spinozist ideals of freedom and harmony? Why did the Enlightenment fail? The answer in this final volume is disappointing. It’s hardly an answer. Israel merely asserts that until 1844 Marx is on the right track—after that he studied economics and turned to socialism. Yet not all socialism is undemocratic. The Marxist version was in any case secular and monist. So, whence the failure? The world-historical answer which I’ve worked out in the seclusion of my attic study is the reading of a student of literary texts which is all I ever claimed to be. Read attentively, Marx didn’t fully secularize his political vision. From Hegel and the Young Hegelians, he inherited “the dialectic.” This played out as a semi-secularized version of the Judeo-Christian belief that history is moving toward a final resolution, which in Marx’s case would be the classless society of Communism. The final struggle heralded in the German version of the Internationale would be bloody and brutal, like the vicious biblical Book of Revelation. The end, however, would justify the means by bringing about an historical equivalent of the New Jerusalem, the utopian end of history.

I’m hardly the first to notice that Marxist historiography echoes Judeo-Christian eschatology, but there is something deep in tracing his turning point to the literary stylizations of his pivotal Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and indeed to a passage which occurs just prior to the author’s first declaration that the proletariat will be the agent of final victory. Marx gets carried away with his rhetorical inversions inspired by the cult of the dialectic. Reading this text, I can imagine the smoke-filled coffeehouses and taverns of the high-spirited Young Hegelians of Berlin. Style determines substance. Le style c’est l’homme même. Every Marxist should take a closer look at this pivotal text. Marx’s dialectic speaks in paradoxical inversions which transport him ecstatically to his revolutionary conclusions. What is to be done? He doesn’t have the answer yet, but he has mastered the style that will generate the answers. “The weapon of criticism can’t replace the criticism of weapons.” With this feint, he takes dialectical rapier in hand. He wields it and it wields him. The thrust and counterthrust of his antithetical inversions conjure with the relations of France and Germany, theory and practice, Luther’s Reformation, as a revolution of theory, and the final revolution, which must and therefore absolutely will take place in practice. Without empirical evidence, his shadow-fencing resolves the deepest riddle of all history:

Luther, to be sure, overcame servitude based on devotion, but by replacing it with servitude based on conviction. He shattered faith in authority by restoring the authority of faith. He transformed the priests into laymen by changing the laymen into priests. He liberated man from external religiosity by making religiosity that which is innermost to man. He freed the body of chains by putting the heart in chains. (Marx, Early Political Writings. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, ed. and trans. Joseph O’Malley with Richard A. Davis [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994], pp. 64-65).

A classicist friend gave me the term for Marx’s stylistic trick: antimetabole. It’s the perfect embodiment of the charm of the dialectic. The interplay of the universal and particular, of negation and affirmation, all comes together in the radiant apocalyptic inversion whereby the last shall become the first.

Our answer: in the formation of a class with radical chains, a class in civil society that is not of civil society, an estate that is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere of society having a universal character because of its universal suffering and claiming no particular right because no particular wrong but unqualified wrong is perpetrated on it; a sphere that can claim no historical title but only a human title . . . a sphere, finally, that cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all the other spheres of society, thereby emancipating them; a sphere, in short, that is the complete loss of humanity and can only redeem itself through the total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society existing as a particular estate is the proletariat. (p. 69, all italics in the original)

Oh, the grand coherence of it all when those puzzle pieces fall in place! As if a chemical process were working its transformative magic through industrialization! The worst yields to the best. The magical incantation of the dialectic spins out the answer: the last shall be first.

The proletariat is only beginning to appear in Germany as a result of the industrial development taking place. For it is not naturally existing poverty but artificially produced poverty, not the mass of men mechanically oppressed by the weight of society but the mass of men resulting from society’s and especially the middle class’ acute dissolution that constitutes the proletariat . . . (p. 69)

The Young Hegelians’ overthrow of the “inner priest” and their emancipation of the “heart in chains” has opened the path to their final revolution. The Reformation removed church authority: the coming revolution will eliminate the authority of the state which is only the form of mental control exercised by the bourgeoisie. If we look around and listen to the voices of Trump voters and firearm worshipers, the authority of the state really has gone the way of church authority. So, what went wrong with Marx’s calculations? He got so many things right. What he got wrong was the utopian end-time glow of it all. Marx wasn’t arguing empirically. The momentum of dialectical inversion thrusts his argument toward his revolutionary conclusion. Just as the Reformation and ensuing Peasant War were the first German revolution, which only liberated the Germans from the Church by eliminating the clerical estate and confiscating church property, the final revolution will emancipate the whole human being, eliminating class society by confiscating bourgeois property. And just as the earlier “revolution” was an apocalyptic struggle to resolve supreme contradictions, the proletarian revolution will be the last battle, whereupon the last shall be made first. Albeit by way of a cosmic struggle between the new Christ and Antichrist.

The German language invented the word Konfliktkultur to denote the way conflicts are conceived and carried out. The term is usually used for the present day, but it needs to be extended to history. The Apocalypse, the Reformation, the English Civil War, and the French Revolution bequeathed to Marx, and to us, a Manichaean “culture of conflict.” I can visualize a room full of German exiles in Paris or the “Free Men” of Berlin mumbling their assent and raising their glasses to salute their young comrade who in the most elegant style has done what preceding generations of German Hegelians only strove for: taking Hegelian thought to its ultimate level. You can only win the game if you’re still in the game. The Young Hegelian movement was a game of wits and style. Marx won, or at least so his followers thought, by playing the game and changing its parameters. “Until now all philosophies have interpreted the world; now the point is to change it!” How incredibly stupid! Most philosophies have changed the world. None did so without interpreting it. Grad students still fall for Marx’s self-promotion the way his drinking buddies must have in the day. He mastered the kind of thrust that takes an opponent off guard by shifting the rules. It doesn’t matter if such a statement doesn’t hold water. It’s a game changer.

The more practical-minded but still brilliant Engels was in awe of Marx’s brandishing of the dialectical method. Hegel’s system, Engels wrote, can be forgotten; but the dialectical method is the key to truth. As I put it to my sociologist friend: Who has a clue what the “dialectical method” is? Engels observed that the natural sciences focus on processes instead of things. That’s true. But what natural scientist in the world recognizes a “dialectical method”? Every schoolchild understands how the experimental method works. But the dialectical method? It conjures up the illusion that history is working through all its conflicts and contradictions toward some final resolution—an apocalyptic article of faith of the kind that has always encouraged bloody struggles between parties that had God, or some other equally exalted authority, on their side. That’s how progressives in the twentieth century screwed themselves.

People have always known about sex, known about its power to obsess, deceive, and afflict; but after Freud, we could no longer talk about sex without invoking his far-fetched, discredited theories. Poor people have always rebelled against their oppressors and exploiters, but we could no longer talk about this without invoking Marx, Communism, and the Gulag. If a sea captain runs aground and his crew perishes, everyone understands that he should be relieved of his command. If the captains of industry and finance do the same, a hysterical outcry rises up against the threat of Communism. The “too big to fail,” whose greed and incompetence have ruined millions of lives, must be protected at all costs from the consequences of failure. Communism, which was once the specter haunting Europe, is now the admonitory defense against a socialism of common sense and decent human accountability. This ideological defense is being bolstered against the insufferable truth-teller from Vermont by shameful screeds like the latest trahison des clercs of David Brooks in the New York Times. Marx and Communism are now the wall protecting the failed captains of finance and industry from accountability. That’s how they keep us on their collision course with destruction. Iceberg ahead! All the more reason to lend the captain unquestioning obedience! Long live the captains of industry and finance! Hold course! Shared responsibility would be equivalent to the Gulag. In any comparable mass disaster, collective oversight and a sharing of goods would be a no-brainer.

These silent harangues are intertwined with projects I’ve resumed: my collaborative edition-translation of the Paracelsian cosmological writings and my efforts in collaboration with another friend to publish our collected essays in a joint volume. All I can do now is to chart the forgotten highways of the past with their blocked accesses to alternate universes of world history. How many bridges were burned, how many avenues cordoned off by events which were not inevitable? The same is happening now. My only way to find meaning in my arcane researches is by regarding them as unchosen directions of freedom, alternate realities—exit ramps to realities left unexplored. The point? To posit that people could have thought differently and things gone differently, which is to profess faith in human freedom.

I sympathize deeply with the ignored and despised of Little Egypt. But if I were really honest with them, they wouldn’t like what I would have to say. We see ourselves as natives of this land, but we came here in the last few seconds of cosmic time as speculators, no better than the venture capitalists dominating the world economy. We bullied and brutalized all inhabitants and interlopers into leaving. “This land is your land. This land is my land.” Woody Guthrie’s Leftist populism was already a cover up. We came here lured by the darkness, by the same prospects that attract irresponsible entrepreneurs and incite drinkers and drug addicts today: it’s the old attraction of the more intense experience which abandons security and risks everything to embark upon the oceanic darkness. There would be no need to look any further than Melville for the so-called Great American Novel. Moby Dick takes us inside our deepest and most formative impulses and reveals their final consequences:

Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially when my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Ishmael, in order to allay his frustrations and aggressions (rendered charming by self-irony), is driven to embark on the vast unmarked sea. The whalers he joins are now considered the formative venture capitalists of America. Melville is, as Pavese put it, the Homer of the Pacific. Moby Dick is the American Faust. The Pequod is what all whaling enterprises really were: a war against nature and a get-rich-quick scheme in one. Most of those ventures failed then as now. They were manned by the likes of us: thrill- and profit-seeking adventurers recruited by stalwarts who professed a Quaker sanctimoniousness. The whaling crews were made up of the same low-end speculators that infiltrated the wilderness that once encompassed our landlocked peninsula of Southern Illinois: the advanced guard of our ruthless war against nature, our crusade to destroy the monstrous unknowable Resident of the Depths, whether in the sea or in the bowels of the earth—that Other we can neither worship nor leave in peace, that same embodied Cosmic Power that fires up our sundry lusts, that roils the undercurrents of our seas and stirs the depths of our souls. Moby Dick is American prophesy. Read it and recognize yourself, America!

That same demonic drive to dominate and profit conquered all “the dark places of the world”; it made their people covet what we covet, made them sacrifice to our insatiable desire theirtraditions and their poor but stable way of life. What are they fleeing, these refugees crowding our southern borders? They are fleeing the climate catastrophe we have brought about and press to its bitter end. They are fleeing a violence much like the gang warfare of Prohibition but more vicious, powered by the same supply and demand mechanism that satiates our thirst for intense experience, for the thrill of the high or the fascination of watching narcos eviscerate one another on our tiny screens, while we sanctimoniously cry out for safety and sobriety. What do they want, these refugees at our borders? They want survival and security and they want our very own way of life with its untold possibilities for advancement and thrills. They are like us for better and worse. That’s why they inspire such terror in us: they are us.

When I traveled through Mexico fifty years ago, I was never afraid, not even in the remotest villages and towns of the North. Now I’m hearing from this spokeswoman for the Union County Hispanics from Michoacán that returning Mexican-Americans constantly fear for their safety. Why else did those murderous gangs arise but in competition to slake our insatiable thirst for narcotic thrills? Yet she tells me that she and her husband will retire to Guanajuato, one of the secure places in their native country. Even after a lifetime here, even after converting to the Baptist Church after her priest advised her to suffer and live with her abusive first husband and she was barred from Communion for divorcing and remarrying, after learning to fear their native country—they do not feel at home in their local church and town. The immigrant flood generates eddies and tides. Our insatiable desire is stirring up a new Great Migration of Peoples, a new Völkerwanderung. The Visigoths who defeated Rome at Adrianopolis in 378 wanted only to cross the Danube and migrate to Roman territory to flee the Huns’ onslaught. Once safe, they continued their migration, destroying empires along the way. I suspect that the same chaotic migration is now in progress. I recall the sounds I heard in the cypress swamp outside Karnak.

In the Sixties I read a satire of the Leftist movement in 1930s New York during the Depression. Union Square by Albert Halper (New York: Literary Guild of New York, 1933) began with the manifesto of a demented printer. The printer was the kind of ingenious madman no less prevalent in the heyday of the antiwar and student movement. The manifesto offered a spectacular and amusing vision:

Union Square is surrounded on all sides by mountains. To the north are Alps, to the east the Caucasus, to the west the Urals, while southward stand the Ozarks, with the plains of Texas just beyond. And south, further still, lies the heavy sea, which heaves and rolls like oil.

This is no idle dream. Through the passes and steep canyons swarm, all day long, Finns and Tartars, Poles and Italians . . . . They come from all directions, with fine white dust ingrained between the tiny wrinkles of their skin and joints, some with fierce eyes, others with an old, hollow hunger in their bones, and all in silence.

. . .

There are no trees, no beds of flowers. Seasons roll round like huge wagon wheels, each spoke a month, each revolution a year; the thick, fat hubs are as stolid as fate.

This is a land of waste and doom. The cold comes when the night falls and the wind rides on a storm. (3-5)

When I read this forty years ago, I assumed that the crack-brained manifesto was a foil for the equally wacky communists soon to be introduced. Now it seems that the crack-brained printer was a prophet, an “Old Rube” who eyed his world under the aspect of eternity and recognized its hidden realities.

Little Egypt is bounded on three sides by water. To the North, the steppes arc toward the Polar Zone. Out of the Torrid South stream hordes of peace-loving but potentially hard-fighting Goths in flight from the savage Huns who have terrorized their regions of origin. The tribes, clans, and nations of the continental landmass have been stirred and whipped into a maelstrom, each fleeing and driving forth others in turn. They are pushed thence and drawn hither by the need for ready labor in the forests, orchards, and colonies of organic farms that dot the countryside: the raised bed cultivations and food forests of a network of alternative production for local and nearby markets. From Kathy Ward, I know about this agronomist dimension of the Egyptian intelligentsia.

Post-hegemonic successor communes spring up where the power of the state recedes. Their lean-to shanties cower in or alongside the brick remnants of a civilization wasted by greed and ambition. But the region is also interspersed with makeshift outposts of learning, repositories of forgotten records of thought. These interest me: the books people have preserved in communal, private, or makeshift libraries, the village scribes or hermits who delve the past and record the present, solitary monks in a Merovingian darkness. Soon the pandemic scourges of the ancient and medieval worlds will make this mixture seethe, touching off explosions, separating and bonding its elements into once familiar, now startling compounds: the tarpaper and cardboard compounds of a motley migration of hunters and gatherers, beggars and incidental laborers, refugees from the South or from nearby cities, displaced, impoverished locals, humble or angry indigents, armed and mobilized against interlopers, the rootless young and the cast off old—to which group I myself may soon belong.

6. Lost Byways

Love never fails. Prophecies will cease; tongues will be stilled; knowledge will pass away.
(1 Cor 13:8)

It’s now the end of March. I was last in Little Egypt for one of my most vivid and informative stays in the first week of this month. An eternity has passed between then and now. Tectonic plates have skated out from under our feet, wheels shifted, axels cracked, mainstays crumbled. March winds have conflated the rubble of spheres which were once as sharply juxtaposed as day and night, as north and south, fixed and fleeting. I grasp at them as they hurl past me in whatever configuration, as memories or fantasies, weightless and ethereal or laden with the burden of guilt and the poison of doom. There are real places which I have visited repeatedly, always hoping to resolve some mystery I sensed behind their facades. Those places have invaded my dreams to the point that my recollections are a blurring of factual palimpsest and painful imagination.

There are the country churches of Union County, preserved by the descendants of the country people who no longer live around them. Darrel showed me around these sites and explained the questions associated with them. The Cumberland Campground Presbyterian Church is associated with the Trail of Tears which passed by here. Since some of the exiled Cherokees were Presbyterians, they may have been in this church; but efforts to locate their remains in the sprawling graveyard turned up nothing. The name Campground Church is not a reference to their camp but to that of a revival meeting that brought disparate congregations together and provided the name for Union County. History begins with white people, yet disjunction stimulates a desire to dig and claim deeper roots. Eventually, when Jewish Israelis have crushed and dispersed the occupied Palestinian remnants, Jewish adolescents and old people will start digging and boasting of the Arab sites erased by conquest. That would be like us.

Darrel had shown me his well-researched article on the Trail of Tears in Southern Illinois where it was especially tragic. He begins by citing the generosity of the people here with the stricken settlers in the north of the territory when a bad harvest threatened starvation and the better harvest in the south earned it the name of Egypt, the land of plenty made fertile by its great rivers. When the Cherokee made their forced march in winter from Golconda on what became route 146 to the Mississippi ferries that would carry them over to Missouri, little if any generosity was shown to them by the white settlers. Money was earned on ferry passage, on sales to Indians, and even on burial fees charged to those who died—who in some cases may have been murdered to that very end. Exceptionally cold weather made the Mississippi impassible and stranded the parties without supplies. They died by the thousands and are buried in unmarked graves. I recall how once in Barcelona I scoffed at my apartment mate, a half French, half German-Jewish student who compared American Indian removal to the Nazi genocide. He was right. When people in Jonesboro decided to name a local park after the Trail of Tears, they put up a fake totem pole for remembrance until someone pointed out the shame of it. What a contrast with the somber monuments of the early German settlers here!

A tiny Lutheran church with an ornate altar and pulpit is overshadowed by the sprawling cemetery in which the oldest gravestones, eroded by time and weather, display barely legible German inscriptions, simple, pious verses inscribed in a language the living still understood. The solitary Kornthal Church awaits us in the tiny uncultivated valley that drew the embattled Austrian Lutherans to this safe haven beyond the sea and wilderness they crossed to their Egyptian sanctuary. We pass a junction where a free black community thrived under the protection of a sympathetic opponent of slavery. When it was dissolved, some of its residents moved to nearby Vienna, a city whose first houses appear abruptly before us in this rural county too poor to afford urban sprawl. Vienna was one of the few non-sundown cities without a sign warning black people against being caught in town after dark. In general, the black folk who had been freed from slavery were driven from place to place, sheltering for as long as possible in this one or that, setting up communities on the margins of places like Vienna.

As we approach the city limits and drive toward the main square, turning right at a large Victorian house with one of those “widow’s walk” platforms on its roof, Darrel tells me the story of the Vienna black community. An extraneous detail brings it to life for me personally. An older white woman told him a story incidental to the events. In 1954, she was on a date with her boyfriend who would soon become her husband. This is as memorable a moment as anyone could imagine. Approaching the city limits (as we were doing now as Darrel began the story), the girl and her boyfriend saw that the south side of town was in flames, overcast with a canopy of smoke, sparks, and flying debris.

A black man had been accused of raping and robbing a white woman who lived in the Victorian house with the widow’s walk. Her brother got his buddies deputized. They went from house to house in the black south side searching for the man. When they couldn’t find him, they torched the houses of the black neighborhood. Eventually, the accused turned himself in to a doctor and was arrested. His jailers left his cell unlocked, hoping that he would try to escape and fall into the hands of a lynch mob. He was tried and sentenced to life. The black residents were indemnified but chose not to stay in Vienna. I can imagine how they scattered to the winds, seeking refuge with acquaintances or relatives in the black diaspora which is lost to us in its lines of migration like dust scattered in a storm.

I can’t help wondering how the sight of the black community in flames would have stuck in the minds and evolved in the memories of this couple. And the expelled. Those families must have retained some memory of their expulsion. Nothing is left of the neighborhood. An overgrown road leads to the site where the black church once stood. We drive around through this very small yet fully urbanized place. Like so much of Southern Illinois, it is poor but for the most part not squalid. Only when we have driven back out and stopped at the burial site of a famous giant mascot pig (“King Neptune” was used for selling war bonds during the Second World War), do I think about the crude leaflets I saw attached to lampposts bearing the mysterious abbreviation E.I.R.A. and beneath it three conical black pointers. I ask Darrel if he saw them too, but he hasn’t noticed anything of the sort. Was it only my imagination?

Now I’m seated by myself in a small store-café-filling station just outside Herod near the county line that separates Hardin from Gallatin in the Shawnee Forest. I’ve stopped here several times before and spoken to the proprietors or their customers. I’m not quite sure how often. My sense of time is blurred by repetition, the liminality of the location, and perhaps by the creeping slippage of memory that now often forces me to check which day of the week it is. I get here by passing through Harrisburg and on past the steppe-like wasteland of an enormous, nearly exhausted strip mine, where from the state road the loading trucks look like toys in some horizon-filling sand box. Then I drive up and up, past poor but neat rural dwellings and some finer ranch-style houses, one of which sports the first Confederate flag I’ve noticed so far in Southern Illinois, then over a pass of sorts, through tiny Herod, past a church that proclaims “Visitors Welcome, Members Required,” and then downhill, to a point where I find a small, crudely but compactly built place with a sign that announces the Hardin-Gallatin General Store.

It’s a natural place to stop. The interior is small but snugly filled with merchandise, four tables, a deli counter, and a small kitchen space where breakfasts and daily lunch specials are prepared. The vaulted ceiling is cheap plywood, the floor rough, the kitchen accommodations in plain view. Yet somehow everything fits together in an unpretentiously reassuring way. The first time I stopped here, I begged their pardon and addressed customers at a table having breakfast to ask about the area. A woman who had been seated with the others got up and went behind the counter as if to facilitate my conversation. She was middle-aged, dignified, and cultivated in appearance. Another time, I noticed the mother and grandfather seated with two other older patrons studying a text of some sort. When I heard mysterious words being pronounced at their table, I moved closer in order to figure out what they were reading. There were strange words which sounded like “indie essay” and “undie in falsay.” My nosiness made them pause with a clearing of throats. Only later did I realize that Latin words were being sounded out in a thick Southern Illinois accent.

On other visits, I observed the daughter and father or grandfather who does the cooking and discretely runs the place. The daughter is perhaps sixteen. Elsewhere she would have braces on her teeth, but as Tolstoy wrote somewhere in War and Peace, imperfection individualizes her modest loveliness as she bustles around re-arranging merchandise and counting cash register change, as if she were the manager of some upscale restaurant at its opening. My radar tells me that she, her mother, and grandfather are a family so intimately knit that they never exhibit or aver their love: none of the hugs and expressions of affection which have transformed the familial behavior of us cold-fish WASPs in more urban areas. Their love, like their regional identity or their religion, is just the way it is, the way it should be.

I’m charmed by this little place and have been since I first stopped here. It’s only ten a.m. but I decide that I would rather wait and eat lunch here. I say hello, ask what’s on special, and tell them that I’m going to hang around until it’s my lunch time. I pour myself a cup of coffee and sit down at one of the tables and read a novel. Even absorbed in my book, I can tell that they are intensely aware of my quiet presence. When the older guy takes a break from preparing the lunch special, we chat about the area, about its game and wildlife, the timber rattlers which he’s encountered often, and the “coyodogs” or coyotes that have bred with dogs to produce peculiar looking creatures. He doesn’t boast about the wildness. When informing me that all of Hardin County only has a few thousand residents, his tone sounds as if he were honestly reporting the flaws of a car I’m thinking of buying from him. Customers who drop by and make small purchases, one of them a black or mixed-race man, have the same dialect pattern and behave as if they were old friends or relatives. When I ask if I might take a photo of the interior, the old guy directs my attention to a framed nighttime image of the place. With lights ablaze, it looks like a beacon for wanderers or maritime vessels, a landlocked lighthouse.

At 11, it’s late enough so that I can enjoy lunch. Catfish is the special today. I explain that I don’t care what it costs, but because of my damaged throat I can only eat small servings and don’t like leaving good food uneaten. I receive one small catfish filet and small servings of potato salad and baked beans. It’s just right for me. When I finish and go to the cash register to pay, the bill for my coffee with one refill and the whole lunch is only $ 5. These people are as honest as the day is long. The mother notices that I have an issue of a cheaply produced magazine of Hardin-Gallatin County local history. She asks if that’s the latest issue. I explain that it’s an older one and that I’m looking for the nearby site of the College in the Hills. “Oh,” they exclaim, “that was just across the road and in a bit. If it weren’t such a foggy day, you could walk down the road that starts over there and then turn to the right onto the old pathway. I wouldn’t go now or you’re liable to tumble into a ravine.” As I start off, the old guy who is genuinely concerned about my welfare accompanies me out and tells me to watch my step in the fog. As he turns to go back inside, his eye catches a leaflet stapled to his door. It has the symbol of three sharp peaks and the abbreviation E.I.R.A. With a gesture of disdain, he rips it off, crumples it, and gives it a toss into the oil drum trash bin next to the entrance.

I decide to take my chances in the fog. The state road has a shoulder I can walk on safely. I’ll see what I can see. The walk does me good. In a fog, a very narrow radius usually offers full visibility; and I like looking at things up close while I scan the roadside for the start of the old pathway to the college site. When you’ve already gone a certain distance, you feel like turning back empty handed is twice the loss, so I continue longer than I should. When I glance at my watch, it’s already half past noon. I’ve been walking for an hour. Now the narrow radius and foggy woods are getting creepy. The word fugue state comes to mind. I’m not quite sure how it is defined, but I like the sound of it. Could it be that all my restless searching, my crossing of the Eurasian landmass, my researching Egypt, was not a forward movement but a flight, a shedding of identities to uncover the real one. Is that what a fugue state is? No less appealing is the association with the musical fugue: it’s as if I were moving through life within a tiny radius of visibility but with my narrow path intersected by unseen worlds, alternate realities.

Drastic images come to mind. I’m driving homeward and reach the stretch of road construction where there is the unbarricaded abutment of the overhead bridge, the one that invites suicides. As I fix my gaze on it, a flock of dark, bedraggled men, women, and children run in front of my car. When I veer and look to the right to see what they’re running from, I lose control and careen off the pavement and into the median ditch. I barely miss the abutment but come up hard against some large barrier and am thrown forward, banging against the steering wheel. Why didn’t the air bags inflate? When I climb out to inspect the damage, I witness a flight of more dark-skinned refugees. The stragglers are falling into the hands of club-wielding vigilantes. When I see a child threatened, I shout and try to reach them, but I’m evidently paralyzed, quadriplegic.

I shake off this agonizing vision, only to pick up some echo of the distant sounds I heard in the cypress swamp outside Karnak. Surely, it’s my imagination. I’m only interpreting the ringing in my ears. I’m construing the subliminal sounds of the silent woods. But it can’t be shaken, this sound of distant riot or celebration. With relief, I now hear for certain a vehicle driving up from the rear. I move aside, but the four-door pickup stops. A window is rolled down. From within a voice asks, “You’re in the middle of nowhere. How about a ride?” I explain that I was just about to turn back. “So are we,” comes the hard-edged reply. I consider the distance and decide to accept. Three men are in the front seat. I’m alone in back with a pile of stuff that includes leaflets with three black pointers and the abbreviation E.I.R.A. I pick up one and inspect it. “Egypt Is Rising Again,” says the middle front passenger, turning his head slightly. I recognize the round face, now covered with thick stubble and framed by the MAGA cap and camo jacket that urban people adopt when they’re playing a role from Duck Dynasty or Ozark. This is him. Why doesn’t he recognize or speak to me? Who has he fallen in with? They mutter among themselves about where to turn and I notice their exaggerated “country” accents. They’re laying it on thick. Suddenly, the whole thing seems threateningly unreal. Is this what a fugue state is?

Though I’m not given to alarm or panic, I’m suddenly terrified. When they turn on a side lane to start back in the other direction, I blurt out that I need to take a leak. Throwing open the rear door, I leap into the brush and run, crouching, fleeing, and then hiding. Their voices are angry, but they can’t find me in this fog. Crouching, I move further away, but then the ground gives under my feet and I plunge. When the rock face of the precipice rasps my leg, I kick away from it and tumble into a treetop. Its branches whip and catch me and slow my decent until I land in bushes that cushion my fall. Slamming down hard, I slowly move and stretch my limbs and am astonished to find that nothing feels broken. I can move. I can stand. I can walk. I exit the bushes and come face to face with a small knot of ragged dark-skinned people. Luckily, I speak their language. “Necesito ayuda,” I appeal to them. An older man, almost as old as me and even with a certain resemblance to me, supports and encourages me to move with him down an overgrown pathway. It’s a matter of minutes, but it seems to take forever for us to reach an abandoned two-room schoolhouse. I attended one like this in the first grade. Inside, refugees are huddled. In one corner an elementary school class is in progress by the light of a kerosene lamp. In another, children are quietly reading. In a third, exhausted figures sprawl on the floor. Buckets and wash basins have been set out here and there. Evidently the roof leaks. The older man accompanies me to the threshold of a back room and nods that this is where I should go.

Inside this back room there are no windows and no lights, not even a kerosene lamp. The room is full of files and records stuffed into makeshift folders cut from cardboard boxes and crammed into rough-hewn bookshelves. It isn’t empty. A figure stands in a corner with an authoritative air. “You’re here?” he asks. “Who are you,” I inquire, “and how do you know me?” “Oh, we know all about you and your researches.” “Who is ‘we’?” The dark figure with the familiar voice responds that he is surprised I can even use the pronoun “we.” “Take a look at where you’ve been. Your life consists of one abandoned friend after another. You were too special for ‘we,’ weren’t you?” Surely, I must be dreaming. “That guy who chased you? Who do you think launched him on his path? You couldn’t even be bothered to teach him where he went wrong. So, he found his way on his own. If it’s the path to hell, who lured him onto it?” There is something outrageously insolent about this tone. I want to ask, “who appointed you judge of the world?” But the man moves out of the shadows and I recognize his face. I am looking into a mirror, but the face that I see has a deep gash in its temple and eyes rolled upward, dead.

Stunned, I sit down on a chair with my face in my hands and try to recall at which point I got on this track. I’m evidently dead, but I don’t know how it came about; and I don’t really want to think about it. If this is the last fading glow of my consciousness, there are other things I need to work out. Dead is dead, but what’s next and what was the point of it all? What comes to my philologically trained mind is the source of those Latin snippets I overheard on an earlier visit to the Hardin-Gallatin Store: Haec omnia inde esse in quibusdam vera, unde in quibusdam falsa sunt, “some of these things are true and some of them false.” Those words of Augustine introduce Lessing’s Education of Humankind, a pedagogical jeu d’esprit which taught people to think critically and seriously about religion, whether they embraced or rejected it. Lessing taught that there are three levels of education: in the first, we are educated by punishments and rewards; in the second, we learn the intrinsic value of the purity of our inner life; in the third, corresponding to the Eternal Gospel of medieval mystics, visionaries, and revolutionaries, we learn to love the good for its own sake, not because it offers us the profit of an afterlife. The third level is pure love. We are all on the same path, concludes Lessing, some further along than others; but short of the final goal, we should not assume that we are more advanced than anyone else. Something else comes to mind: I know the identity of the elusive German artist who took the name of Penny Cent and tried to establish a proletarian College in the Hills here in Herod: his real name was Mark Thaler. Penny Cent was a play on the monetary double meaning of his actual name. It also alluded to his reduction to the near nothingness of Herod, out of which he tried to parlay a non-elite educational enlightenment. I know because my erstwhile apartment mate and comrade at pinball in Barcelona told me this on one of our day-long strolls through las Ramblas. It is all coming together… but the lights are getting too dim in here. I see a backdoor outlined by the rays that seep through its cracks. The old Hispanic man takes me by the hand and accompanies me to it. When he opens it, he bids me Vaya con Dios and nods toward two figures waiting for me outside. I know I am supposed to set off for the horizon from which the light proceeds, and I know that the journey will last forever; but I sense a loving hand on either shoulder. My wife and son have come to see me off. I never was and never will be separated from their love.

7. Life after Life.

I am still alive then. That may come in useful.
Samuel Beckett, Molloy.

It’s early April. I’m back in Bloomington. The whole world has ground to a halt. Much of humanity is incarcerated. No one knows how this will play out, but I am certain the world will never be the same again. Our frame of reference has shifted. Things that stay the same will be for that very reason utterly transformed, perhaps inverted, in their meaning.

I escape to Egypt for clandestine day trips, taking my food with me or buying staples in grocery stores that remain open. In villages or towns, I park and walk the streets. When the weather is good, people sit on their porches to chat with passersby. Unlike where I live, the sight of a man on the loose doesn’t make them panic and flee indoors. They probably wouldn’t mind if I came closer, but I always keep a decent distance, usually staying on the sidewalk. Older people remember the ups and downs of their villages and region. I ask about the total solar eclipse which was visible here. Everyone remembers the eerie pallor and silence when nature seemed to come to a halt for a few long minutes. The quarantine is a comparable eclipse of the social world. History, like the turning of the earth, is too slow to register. Only when the wheels come to a halt do we sense our helpless captivity in the infinite machina mundi that cranks out the life of the world. The mechanisms of time are beyond us. When it suddenly grinds to a halt, we realize that our presumptive freedom was never more than the free flight which the stone would register (so Spinoza), if it were conscious while being cast through space by the invisible hand. We also realize that we have been dwelling in an imaginary, imagined universe and that all we really do know well is what is nearest. We need to start with that and extend our understanding of the world outward because the unseen world is surely in many ways like the small visible world that we occupy.

I haunt the streets of small towns. People sitting on their porches are happy to exchange a few words with a stranger. If the conversation gets interesting and I’m too tired of standing, I carry a collapsible camp chair over my shoulder. It has the weight and feel of a golf bag with only one or two clubs in it. I tell them that I’m originally from here and came back to do research on the area. “What is this area?” I ask. “Are we more like the Delta or the Upper Peninsula, or are we just the south of the state, because every region has a north, a south, an east, and a west? If we’re different, what makes us that way? Did your grandparents tell you anything about earlier times? Did they use words or have sayings that you no longer hear? My grandmother liked to calm me down by telling me to ‘hold your horses’ and it’s obvious why. She was very religious. On the other side, our people were Freethinkers who refused to go to church. There were a lot of distinctions back then that people have forgotten now. Did you ever look for arrowheads along creeks? Did you think about the people who left them there? Is your town pretty much all white? If so, why do you think that is? What do you think is going to happen after we get through with this pandemic? Is this the end of it? What do we do if it continues? Who is the most educated person you know in town here? What have you heard? What do you think?”