FOUR
This Is My Home
Cairo is at the southern end of Illinois, on a stretch of land between the intersecting Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. It is a small, mostly African American town on the end of a long decline.
Cairo has no hotels. The closest Walmart is more than forty miles away, something all the remaining residents will tell you. For shopping it has two Dollar Generals and two small convenience stores selling a selection of milk, snacks, lotto tickets, frozen pizza, liquor, beer, blunts, and vape supplies.
The closest McDonald’s is fifteen miles away, over the Mississippi River in Charleston, Missouri, a small town that has fought the surrounding decline despite losing most of its factories. Charleston hasn’t grown, but it hasn’t shrunk either. It has gotten older, with many kids having left for other places. When I enter it, I meet three older regulars sitting, sipping coffee, reminiscing.
“We used to make things in this town, like shoes and rubber. Those factories—Brown Shoe, Gates Rubber, and Stark Manufacturing—all left for Mexico in the nineties. Our national government allowed factories to leave. You used to get jobs right out of high school in them. You couldn’t get rich from them, but they gave you enough to build a family.
“We used to have a Walmart here, but that closed up. Now we have to drive twenty miles to get to the one over in Sikeston. At least we got the Flying J to bring in trucks.”
I went to Cairo to try to understand the long history of frustrations and wrongs endured by the blacks there that culminated in protests following the death of a young black man in police custody in ’67.
I expected to hear a lot about those wrongs in Cairo from the black residents, but I don’t. Those left in Cairo are focused on the present and trying to get by, to be able to live in the place where they grew up.
Getting by in Cairo is tough. Walking around feels like surveying the damage long after a natural disaster. Entire neighborhoods are just grids of boarded-up buildings being overtaken by vines and shrubs, empty lots, and empty streets, although the town is oddly orderly. The empty lots are mostly free of garbage and not overrun with growth, the streets, street signs, and stoplights are all in order and working. There isn’t much trash because there is nobody left to litter.
There are plenty of reminders of what once was. An old hospital occupies an entire section of town, its decaying mass almost mocking the town that remains. A resident walking past, heading toward the assisted-living center across the street, shouts a warning: “Don’t get too close to that! It is filled with poisons.”
The downtown is a single street in a large field lined with boarded-up buildings. Fake traditional-style lampposts, brick streets, and a wrought-iron archway proclaiming, “Historic Downtown Cairo,” are from past attempts to revive and market it.
The single brick street ends in a floodwall along the Ohio. Behind the wall, Tom, fifty-six, is sitting next to his truck, watching the barges head down the river. He is the only white person I have seen, and he eyes me with caution. “I really shouldn’t be talking to a stranger. This town isn’t safe that way. Didn’t used to be like it is now. People with money all left. Like a ghost town now. Like a ghost town.”
Despite his concerns, he opens up and talks for close to an hour, reminiscing about Cairo and how it used to be: “Kay-ro used to be something. We had a drive-in. We had clubs. We had businesses. We had stores. We had shops. It has two rivers but can’t do a thing with them, because nobody wants to invest money in this town.
“You go thirty miles in any direction from here, go to Paducah, Sikeston, or Cape Girardeau, they are thriving. All three of them have Walmarts. So to get anything you have to go thirty miles there and thirty miles back.”
When I ask if he remembers the protest, he changes my wording to “riots”: “Businesses all left after the riots. I remember them marching and the boycotts and then the National Guard came. Then businesses left and now there are no food stores or no gas stations.”
He goes into the cab of his truck and finds a postcard he keeps in a glove compartment jammed with tools. “This picture is from 1927, when Cairo was something.” When I ask him why he hasn’t left, he says, “I had a good job, drove a forklift for thirty-five years, and didn’t see the need to leave my home.”
I walk for close to an hour without seeing anyone else. Eventually I spot a man walking down the street smoking a cigarette in a neighborhood of beautiful Victorian homes with nobody in them.
He is polite, soft spoken, and smells of drink. He was born and raised in Cairo but left town “for a woman” before coming back for his family. “Most of Kay-ro is family. I am related to most everyone here.”
When I ask about his past, he mentions working odd jobs for money, and a stint in prison. “I got shot four years ago. Got robbed. Gangs did it to me; that slowed me down a bit.”
ME: You used to do drugs?
HIM: Yes, everyone around these parts does.
ME: What types?
HIM: Crack.
ME: Cairo doesn’t seem like a big drug town. I don’t see needles or vials.
HIM: This ain’t a vial town.
ME: When did you start with drugs?
HIM: When I was twenty-one.
ME: When did you stop?
HIM: Shit. I am still on it. Right now!
Up the street is one of the few busy parts of Cairo, a HUD-run housing complex from the fifties, a place I recognize from the protests, when shots were fired into it at the protestors. It is the only place in town where you see activity, beyond the gas station. As I get out of my car to take pictures, a man approaches me, and asks, “You from the Housing Authority?”
ME: No. I am a photographer and writer and—
HIM: You here to write about the problems with these buildings? We could use some attention.
ME: Not explicitly, I am here to—
HIM: Damn. These building are falling down.
ME: They look well kept.
HIM: Come live in them. They ain’t well kept. They are old and their foundations are rotten.
ME: I didn’t mean no disrespect—
HIM: That is OK. Just we been waiting and waiting on housing authority to show up.
He goes back into his apartment, and as I walk away, another man, backing up in an old car down the block, yells at me from the passenger seat: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE! WHO ARE YOU?”
I walk toward his car, explaining that I’m a photographer, but he interrupts me.
HIM: I ASKED, WHO ARE YOU! WHAT IS YOUR FUCKING NAME?
ME: Chris Arnade.
I reach his car. He is a young teen being driven by an older woman. I offer my hand. He stares at me.
HIM: Are you Sean Michael Smith?
ME: No. Who is he?
HIM: FBI agent who been coming around these parts.
ME: No, I am not that.
HIM: You sure? You look like Sean Michael Smith.
ME: I am sure. I can show you my driver’s license.
HIM: You look like Sean Michael Smith.
ME: I am not.
As the car moves away, he hangs his head out the window. “Well if you a white guy coming around the hood, you gonna draw attention. What is your name again?”
Shambrae, twenty-five, stands by. After the car rounds a bend she comes up to me. “Don’t worry about him. He is on drugs.”
I ask her about the buildings, and she shrugs, “I ain’t from around here. I didn’t grow up here. I come from the north side of town, not these here projects.”
ME: But you are from Cairo?
HER: Yes, the north side of town, not these projects.
ME: Do you like Cairo?
HER: It is home, I love it. I might dislike some things, but this is the only thing I know.
ME: What do you do now?
HER: I go to night school. I didn’t finish high school. I got pregnant at sixteen. Hard to finish school once you got a child. Now I got two, one eight and one three.
She sits quiet for a few moments, then lets loose with a poetic rant, more sung than spoken: “We are a town with a lot of hopelessness, lot of sorrow, lot of despair, lot of pain. But we are good people, smart people, who could show that if we had opportunity. We can be productive, but there is no grocery store, no gas station, no resource center. Nothing is here. We have to go out, travel to do anything. To get groceries, to get gas, to go to school, anything.”
I tell her that was powerful and that she should write it down.
She smiles.
“Well, I am going to school. I am getting my welding degree at Shawnee Community College, the only girl in the program.”
I congratulate her and ask if she’ll leave when she graduates.
She says, “I want to stay. If there are jobs. Because Cairo is my home.”
The busiest store is the corner bodega—with most of the business coming from selling Hunt Brother pizza, wings, lotto tickets, and liquor. The bodega owner, Khalid, came from Tennessee two years ago at the suggestion of a relative. “Most people here are family and related. I have never had a problem here. People said I was crazy to come here. Everyone has been nice and friendly.”
Inside, Coco, twenty-nine, is holding her niece, picking up milk. She was born and raised in Cairo but moved to Detroit to stay with a grandmother after her mother died. A year ago, she moved back. She makes money “doing hair. There really are no jobs in Kay-ro. You have to go outside for work.”
I ask her why she came back.
“No matter where I go, I come back to Kay-ro. It is one thing to jump up and leave, but you got to be ready to pay a lot, and I don’t have a lot. You also got to be ready to miss your home and your family. I guess I am just not ready.”
Marva, forty-seven, comes to pick up a pizza for her lunch break, and while waiting, she chats with those who come in. She works at the local school, which serves all grades, and knows almost everyone in the town. She was born in Cairo, and despite the decline, she has stayed, living a few miles north in a small section named Future City for growth that never came.
I ask why she stayed.
“Kay-ro is my home. It is a small community, and it is my family. You can’t just abandon people you grow up with. You know what they say: ‘There is no place like home.’ But there is a lot to improve. But it is my home. When you don’t have anything else all you got is your home.”
I never intended to stay in my hometown and rarely remember feeling, except when I was very young, like it was my home. I always knew I would leave as soon as I could, and I did so after high school to go to a state college two hours away. It wasn’t far, but I never imagined a future that included my hometown beyond summer work or holidays.
I was the youngest of seven, and all my siblings left, although most stuck around longer than I did. We all had good childhoods in our town, all had close friends growing up, all joined in where best we could (sports, religion, drinking, and drugs), but it was easy for us to leave for college. My parents moved to our small town in 1961, and this, their education, and their politics made us outsiders. Most around us had local roots going back generations, few had parents with higher education, and beyond the black community, few actively supported civil rights.
It was our home, but we didn’t have to like it. We also had options and expectations most didn’t.
Few in my high school were expected to go to college, and few had the resources or information necessary if they had wanted to go. For them, the military was the way out. Those who went to college were expected to return to support their family or work in their business or farm.
So most people stayed in town and built a life there and when I came back each holiday, which I did until my parents moved in 2008, I rarely saw the town change, rarely saw people leave, rarely saw new faces beyond children. Each time I was reminded it was odd that I had left so easily and early.
In my new life, in the front row of the front row, it wasn’t odd at all that I had left. Here most everyone had moved multiple times and moved again for the right opportunity. Here many had grown up feeling like an outsider, stigmatized because of their political views, social views, or lifestyle. All had moved to focus on their education and find an environment less judgmental of them and their views. Here everyone was about their careers and how they saw themselves. Few rarely said where they were from, beyond what college or grad school they attended. Place was just a temporary step in a process.
I was part of a global group of lawyers, bankers, business people, and professors who are their profession first and a New Yorker, Brit, or Southerner second. They are as comfortable in New York City as they are in London or Paris or São Paulo or Hong Kong. Well, in the right neighborhoods in each.
In their minds, staying put is a mistake. If you stay, you limit your career, you limit your wealth, and you limit your intellectual growth. They also don’t fully understand the value of place because like religion, it is hard to measure. What is the value of staying near the family that raised you or in the valley where you were born?
Had I asked those in my hometown when I visited why they stayed, why they were still there, I would have gotten the answer I heard from Cairo, to Amarillo, to rural Ohio. They would have looked at me like I was crazy, then said, “Because it is my home.”
It is an answer that is obvious, because there is value in home, but it isn’t just the value of the house or the yard. It is the connections, networks, friends, family, congregation, the Little League team, the usuals at the hairdresser, regulars at the bar, the union hall, the crew at the vape store, the regulars at the half-price movie night, the guys for Tuesday night basketball.
The front row doesn’t fully get that because they don’t see that value, and like me, they moved before and they will probably move again. We have broken our connections and built new ones. If we can do it, so can anyone else, we think.
When communities and towns are destroyed, partly because of the front row’s policies of globalization, the front row solution is, “Well, just move.” Buffalo is dying, so just leave Buffalo. Or Appalachia or the Rust Belt or Texas or Ohio or wherever they see suffering. It doesn’t matter where people work, where they live, or where they raise a family. If a factory moves and a town dies, then workers can just move.
Never mind that place, family, and friends are often the only network many people have, the only community that provides them a vital role, because what matters is growth at all cost—even if it is brutal—and that requires everyone to always be economic migrants.
The front row likes to say that the US is a country of migrants, where people have long moved for jobs. This has been done before—the dust bowl, the northern migration of African Americans. Yet those were a reaction to failure, not a sign of success.
Jim and Randy are sitting in the corner of a rural Ohio McDonald’s. There isn’t much of a town around, just gas stations, a dollar store, and a few franchises near an interstate exit. Unlike Cairo, there never was much of a town around, just a few villages connected by state and county roads. The interstate brought what little growth there has been.
Both are retired (machinist and truck driver, respectively), both come each morning to have coffee and gossip, and both have spent their entire life in this county, although both correct me when I am writing down their particular details.
“So you were born and raised here,” I say.
“No, I am not really from here. I was born five miles south of here, just beyond the fairgrounds. I moved up here to marry the fire chief’s daughter, and this is where I been since.”
“So your parents are also from here.”
“No, my parents are from fifteen miles from here.”
When I ask them why they stayed all their lives so close to where they were born, they answer quickly and then look at me like it is a crazy question. Neither is impolite, or rude, just confused because the answer is obvious.
“This is where I am from,” says Randy.
“This is my home,” Jim says.
Jim sees I don’t fully get it and adds, “I didn’t want to leave. I wanted this.” He gestures toward the surrounding area. “Being able to see people I was born with every day and staying close to my family. I live on land where my two grown boys and their families live just nine hundred feet from me. My grandkids are only nine hundred feet away. I can see them every day, and do. What more could you ask for?”
In an Amarillo, Texas, McDonald’s, Frank, eighty, sits with a group of morning regulars. The surrounding neighborhood of trailers, small brick homes, and long streets of fast-food franchises, car washes, liquor stores, and auto body shops is diverse, and the table reflects that: Frank is Mexican American and the other two regulars are an African American man and a white man. All three were born and raised in Amarillo, and all have spent their entire lives here.
Their conversation is focused on local events—the death in a car crash of a man they knew, city elections, and talk about friends and family. While the other two men debate politics, Frank removes himself to talk to me.
He tells me that he grew up right near this McDonald’s, without a father, his mother raising seven or eight kids, including him.
ME: Seven or eight?
HIM: I am not sure of the exact number. Our home life was complicated, lots of relatives, uncles and aunts and half brothers and all that.
ME: What did your mom do for money?
HIM: Worked sometimes. She was on welfare at other times. We got help from relatives now and then. I had a grandfather who worked on the railroads. He helped out. I also stayed with uncles, cousins, aunts at various times.
Frank mentions a lifetime of hard work, something he is clearly proud of.
ME: When did you start working?
HIM: Shit. When I was fourteen I was working. I have always been working.
ME: Did you finish high school?
HIM: Hell no. I quit when I was in third grade. Didn’t think I needed an education. I have learned what I needed to learn by self-learning and I made a life of working, building things. I got this curiosity for how things work. Like grain elevators. By nineteen I was climbing up them to fix them and hanging off them by ropes and made a living working on them. Ended up with my own construction company.
Besides work, Frank focuses on raising a family of four kids, all who he made sure got the education he didn’t. “If you don’t have a college education now, you ain’t worth a damn. That is at least what they tell you these days. I am not sure it is right that way. I think all these college people are going to outsmart themselves. They think they understand it all, but they are just making life more complicated.”
I ask him the question I already know the answer to. “Why have you stayed here?”
He shoots back without any pause, “Too many ties here, and it is as good a place as you can find.”
“Do you like it here?”
“Hell, I was born here. Have to like it. It is home.”
Not all the young people in the towns I visited were enthusiastic about their homes. Many wanted to leave, either to get an education or relocate permanently, but leaving isn’t always as simple as the front row thinks.
Moving is expensive, physically and emotionally, requiring money and information many don’t have. It requires having knowledge of big things and small things. You have to know which schools to apply to, which scholarships are available, which internships to get, how to write the proper essay, how to navigate a new city, how to dress “properly,” how to speak “properly.” It requires years of learning a new culture that comes with wealth and education.
It also requires leaving behind family obligations, something many kids can’t or don’t want to do. Especially those from the back row, who early on are burdened with the problems and obligations of an adult.
In Amarillo, Julio, twenty-one, is with his parents on a quiet and poor street outside his aunt’s trailer. He had driven sixty miles from his small hometown to bring his parents to the doctor and visit his aunt. “She doesn’t speak any English, and her son is in jail.”
Back in his hometown Julio works on a ranch, mostly with the cattle, coming to Amarillo only a few times a month. He prefers his hometown (“Amarillo is too big”) but still wants to move.
“It is too hot, and other than work and family, there isn’t much for me. I have friends in Oregon and Washington. I would like to go there.”
I ask him why he can’t go, and he mentions his older parents’ health, “They adopted me when I was a baby because I was born to a mother too young to raise me. I don’t keep up with her. I hear she lives in Houston. Or maybe it is Dallas.”
“What about college?” I ask.
“I thought of going, but I had to help out around the house and take care of my parents. I would like to go someday, maybe become a herbacologist. Study plants. There is another word for it. I don’t know what it is.”
“Biologist?”
“Yes. That is the word. Me and plants go hand and hand. I am happiest when I am working with them and getting my hands in the dirt.”
I ask if he has considered night school, and he points out the closest one is forty miles away, then adds, “I also spend lots of the night helping out my parents with chores and making sure they are OK. I am gonna be here until my parents are gone. Then I will do my own thing.”
In Reno, Nevada, Andrew, nineteen, is sitting in the otherwise empty rec center of the local community college, studying for a summer midterm. He has “one full brother and six half siblings.” Both he and his brother are the first in his family to go to college.
Andrew’s mom, a waitress at one of the casinos, raised them by herself, and she is the reason he is staying, “She worked her whole life for me and my brother. For me to provide for her is the biggest thing in my life. That means I have to be here.”
Being close by is especially important for Andrew because his mom is sober after years of addiction. “There were times when we wouldn’t see my mom for weeks. She would be on a bender, messed up in the lifestyle, and me and my brother had to raise ourselves and do things for ourselves. I was just never tempted. I could see how bad it was.”
“How bad was your mom?” I ask.
“She was real bad. She has been sober for seven years. She cleaned it up.”
He pauses then talks about the past. “There was this one time when my father was with his friends, messed up on the couch, and my mom was in jail and my grandma came over to the house to check on us, and her and my father got into a fight. He threw her down the stairs, and they were yelling, and he was hitting her, and me and my brother ran outside to hide. We were, like, ten. I will never forget that.”
I ask if police got involved, and he shoots back without pause, “No. You can’t call the police on your family. It never crossed my mind. People who don’t live through this won’t understand that. They just won’t.”
“What about people who left for bigger colleges who never went through this. Do they frustrate you?”
“I need to choose my words carefully,” he says. “I don’t get frustrated much, but people shouldn’t be able to judge you if they have never been through experiences like that.”
I ask him again if he’s staying in Reno.
“I wouldn’t go out of state. Only reason my mother is clean now is me and my brother’s support. We are here for her. If I could leave here I would, but I can’t. When I get to a point where I can move and bring her, then maybe I will move.”
Crystal, thirty-six, goes to the same community college as Andrew and is also the first in her extended family to go to college. “Just me, nobody else, not even cousins.”
This is her second year in college, a choice she made after years working in retail and warehouses. “There was a period of time, starting about 2009, that I just couldn’t get a job. For nothing. Not McDonald’s, not Walmart. I just had to get an education.”
Like Andrew, she is staying in Reno for family, though in her case for her father, who raised her alone, “My dad is my hero. Best person I ever met. I got three brothers and sisters and he did everything for us.” She has been in Reno all her life, except for one attempt to move to Idaho.
“As soon as I got there I had to come back. I got homesick. My dad wasn’t there, and I need him. Not that I was reliant on his support to pay the bills, I am not, but I just wasn’t around him. I couldn’t talk to him. I couldn’t just drive over and get a hug. I also worried about him.”
Viewed from a distance, Crystal’s and Andrew’s decisions to stay and attend a small community college don’t make much sense. Everyone is supposed to want the best education to make the best career. That is the message everyone hears, and it is how we reward people. We repeat over and over, “Get the best education you can, go to the best school you can.” Yet do we really want to be a society that stigmatizes a daughter or son who stays to help their parents?
It is more than just the emotional and physical obligations of family that make it harder for children from back row towns to move. It is also about their sense of identity. Leaving for college or to live in another town means giving up a part of who you are. Going to college means becoming a different person, and many kids understand that and want that. Like I did, and like so many people I met at college and grad school and in my career did. We didn’t necessarily fit in with the community we were born into, and the community didn’t value our choices and our identity. For us, leaving, if we could do it, made sense.
For others, who feel at home where they are born, it is harder. Moving for college or work means becoming detached from their old identity. It is an especially hard choice for those living in towns struggling and labeled failures. Part of their identity has become intertwined with failure, adding another level of stigma for staying. Even though corrupted and stigmatized, that identity is all some have.
Moving would mean destroying their identity and breaking their support system of family and friends. Their happiness would be reduced. The few good things they have going for them, things that don’t cost money, would disappear.
Mountain Grove, in the Ozarks, is big enough to have a Walmart and a McDonald’s but too small to have a college, although there are courses offered at the Missouri State extended campus—a ranch-style trailer offering mostly online classes.
The town is off US Highway 60, and what energy and buzz is in the town is at the cluster of strip malls, gas stations, and franchises near the exits. That is where the McDonald’s and Walmart are, and both are almost always filled.
Unlike many smaller back row communities, the downtown doesn’t feel defeated and deserted, although it isn’t busy. A well-kept square park with a bandstand, historical markers, and a few statues is at the center. Local businesses surround the park, including an independent grocery store, a diner, and a health food store.
Inside the park toward evening a group of locals pulls out chairs and sits talking, drinking, and gossiping. They are there each night I am, and after the government buildings close, beyond them, there is hardly anyone downtown except the cars passing through or stopping at the grocery.
They flip between discussing who is currently doing what for work, or what type of drugs they are on, or who is going with who. A vehicle passing is almost always identified, bringing an “Oh that is X,” and begins a conversation about their recent heart surgery, or their daughter’s marriage, or the wonderful cookies they made at that bake sale, or their house that was put up for sale despite their having plenty of money already, or about “their brother who was gonna jump me but they didn’t jump me,” or about their “dirty truck and what dirty stupid music they are playing and what dirty stupid nasty people they are.”
When I first come into the park and approach them, they eye me with suspicion, and when I tell them I am a writer from New York, they say, “Oh, you must be here to write about meth” or “You here for the drug stories?” or “You here about the killings?”
I explain that I am there to write about more than just drugs, although I have spent a great deal of time writing about addiction in the Bronx. A man in a trucker cap with a bandage on his face tells me he used to drive to the Bronx for work, back in the day. “I drove trucks up to New York City. It is dangerous there. All sorts of crime. I saw a kid get beat up all over three dollars. Now I work at the chicken factory. That has a different type of danger.”
When I ask if they all were born here, everyone says yes, although Ruth, fifty-six, makes sure I know she is from Freemont, an hour away, and has only been right here since 2004. “Most of my family comes from around here. I thought of joining the navy, but I didn’t. People from around here pretty much stay here. I stayed mostly to take care of my parents. I never did finish high school.”
She starts talking about drug use, including her own son’s, who sits next to her. “I don’t use drugs. Other than cigarettes. Never really even drink much. When I was young, we had things to do, like work. Didn’t have time for drugs.”
Her son, Curtis, smiles. He didn’t finish high school either and is evasive about work or what he has done for work, if anything.
When I ask about his father, both get a sour look on their faces, and Curtis adds, “He was abusive and a drunk and a drug addict and was crazy. He spent some time in jail and eventually was committed. He hasn’t been in my life since I was eight.”
Curtis is currently clean, and like most currently clean, he is excited to talk about his past addiction, telling stories bordering on boasting. “I started early, at fifteen. People I was hanging out with was doing it. K2, drinkin’, meth, heroin. Then I just got tired of it all. Saw what happened to my father and I quit.”
I ask how long he’s been clean, and he says three years. Then, after a pause, he amends his statement: “Well, I was clean for a year, then I started drinking again. Hard drinking. A cousin came to live with us, and her daddy was all into drinking, and he got me into drinking, and I started with a beer, and then I started day drinking, and then I was drunk all the time. I quit that a year ago. Or six months.”
I ask if there are jobs around, and he says no. I ask why he stayed.
“No other place feels like home.”
Next to him, Tammy, fifty-five, holds a Shrek the Third DVD from the library, a bottle of Dr Thunder soda, and jumps in to say she wants to tell her story.
I ask if she is from around here, and she shoots back, “Of course.”
ME: What did your parents do?
HER: They did a little bit of everything. Daddy died, Momma still alive. There are fourteen of us, just two of us kids are gone. One of us is in Wichita, the rest are around here.
ME: What did dad do for work?
HER: Jack of all trades. Raised pigs for money.
ME: What did you do for schooling?
HER: Finished high school. Didn’t go to college. With that many kids couldn’t afford no college. Then stayed around this stinking town. This town sucks.
ME: Why?
HER: I was raised here. It just sucks.
ME: Why stay?
HER: Haven’t left because my family is here and my mom is in bad shape. I got to be by her to help.
A woman crosses the street, and everyone gets up and cheers as she approaches. She is jittery and tweaking and proudly yells, “I just got released from jail, motherfuckers!”
Off the park is a barbershop run by Dwain, seventy-four. He keeps the door open and spends much of the day sitting in his chair looking out toward the park. His shop is filled with pictures of family and customers, outdoor magazines, and a collection of antique Coke bottles and Coke signs. There is no phone or TV in it, because, Dwain explains, “when I had a phone here all the callers wanted to know if there is a wait, and I always tell them, just come down.”
He does have a radio, which he uses to listen to local high school games, preferring them to the pros. “I prefer the high school teams because I know all them kids. I cut their hair as they grew up.”
He was born not far from Mountain Grove, and beyond two years in Kansas City for barber school (“Didn’t like it, too many people in KC.”), he has spent his entire life here, most of it in his shop.
ME: Has this town changed?
HIM: Most shops went to the shopping centers. Used to be busier down here. When towns get a certain size, it moves to shopping centers.
ME: Are there jobs here?
HIM: You see any factories? There ain’t no factories so there ain’t no jobs.
ME: What about drugs?
HIM: Everyone knows someone who has suffered from drugs. I have some relatives who have. Some good friends who have. Ain’t nobody exempt from the bullshit.
ME: You like it here?
HIM: I am the happiest man alive. I have three boys and four grandchildren. Just tickled to death. Rural living is a different lifestyle. Who is happier? You have a family and a belly full and you are all set, that and Jesus in your life. Everything else is complications.
At the county fair at night I pass Dwain, who waves at me with a big smile. Next to the midway is a small rodeo, mostly for teenagers and FFA members from the local high schools. Around the arena is a small grandstand and a line of trucks filled with spectators.
In one of the trucks is a group of regulars from the park. I go up to say hi, and we talk about what I think of Mountain Grove. In the bed of the truck are two younger women, who when they hear I am a photographer from New York City writing a book, ask me to take their pictures.
“We want to be in your book. We gonna be famous.”
I ask if they’ll leave the town if they get famous.
“No. Just build a big house here.”