Been thinkin’ about…Old French bricks

I remember the summer’s light dappled through the urban tree canopy of maple and birch and ginkgo, the summer sky a patchy blue over St. Louis, the old doors blue, red, green and white, each stoop, each old 19th century doorway, leading to another home, another series of lives and pasts and memories and futures. A mockingbird perched high up, surveying. A rabbit bounded into an overgrown lot where others’ memories once stood, now a jungle of castor bean plants and invasive Chinese tree of heaven. Somewhere, far off, came the faint sound of the blues, the smell of late-day pancakes, the air humid from the mighty river just across the field of old railroad tracks. The old bricks beneath my feet were buckled from the passage of time and the growth of old tree roots, some of those trees now long gone but the bricks remain. The summer was hot. It may rain again.

That was a summer between here and there, an in-between space and we all know, deep down, that it is in the in-between spaces where anything may happen. But magic is a funny thing, even in the old fairytales. Sometimes the magic is there, sometimes it isn’t. And more often than not, the magic passes by with most giving the thing not so much as a passing glance. I’m guilty too, of course. The human need for the basics, primal root needs, things like money or safety or shelter or even a pancake, turns the mind from enchantment to mundane habit. A beer truck rumbles past, making deliveries. A stocky young man steps from an expensive car, expensive sunglasses on his forehead, laptop bag slung over his shoulder as he heads to a loft’s set of stairs, old stairs, old stairs over an old garden more reminiscent of New Orleans than the Midwest. Yet here we are nonetheless.

The Gateway to the West is just a couple miles up the way, a grand, hopeful, soaring technological thing of the 1960s, an alchemical thing too, separating the green of the East — all newborn nation — from the gold of the West, the westward sun, the westward expansion. The sun’s path traces our nation’s — a story of cowboys and Indians, of settlers and mountains, of blue versus gray, of dust bowls and hope and struggle and death — all the way to the gold Pacific coast. Of course, not everything or everyone came through St. Louis, Missouri, but enough did to make this strange confluence of Old World and New, of great American rivers, and of great American people, count for something.

Here also was the gateway to the Ozarks, that strange upland that is at once seemingly everywhere and nowhere, a land whose borders are so misunderstood that some have lived their entire lives in the Ozarks and never once realized it. I stand beneath the castor bean leaves for shade and look South. Just a handful of blocks in that direction and the river bluff rises from sedimentary Mississippi River land but this bluff is different from the others. Not 20 feet of good black dirt, not towering sandstone palisade, but instead karst limestone, riddled with caves. High up is the watchful gaze of the windows of the old French-built Southern mansion, the Chatillon-DeMenil. A plantation house without a plantation, a Deep South-appearing thing overlooking a Midwestern city with its own French quarter — Soulard — and a haunted house without ghosts, the Chatillon-Demenil has history that stretches back to a time when this was the Ozarks Osage frontier.

In-between places are strange and heady things. Perhaps it was appropriate that it was here, in a strange and heady in-between place that I was not just doing history research but also hammering out the values of StateoftheOzarks, attempting to define exactly what the Ozarks meant, not only to myself, but to others. What I remember most from those days? How the summer light played in the old spaces, how hope and frustration collided, and how the best of us, our values, our future, seemed often elusive.

Ozarks culture is an elusive thing, easily reduced to pastiche, easily reduced to a set of simple, folksy actions, sometimes just to a handful of arbitrarily chosen decades romanticized beyond their own good. There’s the gunslinging, corncob-pipe smoking hillbillies of the 1880s. The brush arbor meetings with women in white, white to match the little white church behind, the smell of fried chicken in the air, a civilized, religious picture of hillbillies, circa 1920s-something. And then there’s the new-old hillbilly of the 1950s, overalls and floppy hat, guitar in hand, a ready resell to the hordes of lake-looking tourists in big cars, hungry for a lost America and some good old-fashioned country values. All are true, to be honest. Most are good. But these images are the result of things, not the things that result. Romanticized and foggy history offers little fortification against the world at large. A patchwork of “Ozarky” ideas cannot guide a culture forward (though they can be easily subverted for a wide gamut of agendas).

What is the soul of our culture? The lodestar, the crux, the reason? There has to be something here, somewhere amid the intersection of peoples and land, that makes this place different, that calls to us in weird and wonderful ways. I knew I had felt called, once, long ago. Countless others have shared the same with me, one even going so far as to chalk it up to the mystical energies of the crystal limestone itself. Another talked of flying over the region and hearing God’s voice saying this, these Ozarks, was His land. Millennial Ozarkers, often low-paid and underachieving, roll their eyes and dream of leaving as soon as possible. The undercurrent of discontent, of a vague but angry desire for social change, runs strong, as does out-of-control meth and fentanyl, weed and booze. Despite having God’s tabernacles at practically every crossroads, the truth of living in the Ozarks can turn dark fast.

Only two years prior to my sojourn in blues-infused Soulard, totalitarianism had flexed its global muscles, testing cultural resolve, testing independence, freedom, community and virtue. What once was a class war between the haves and the have-nots became a simmering war between those who styled themselves as virtuous through obedience, and those who chose surprisingly Ozarkian values of independence, family and freedom. We saw the curtain drawn back for a moment, drawn back to a world that tolerated freedom so long as it never interfered with policy. The big brother overtones were obvious. And so, two years later I sat down to write the values of StateoftheOzarks, the values of my people, the values that could reflect our region’s culture, always taking care to allow for the strange elasticity needed for this thing called the human experiment, reflecting on the deep heritage that guides us, and keeping the sharp-toothed grit needed to move a culture into an uncertain future and still retain that sure-footed sense of identity, of independence, of freedom, of individuality, of hope, of faith, of compassion, that could, perhaps, inspire a next generation.

“Free will is a natural and divine right,” I wrote. Outside, the leaves wavered in the summer heat. The sun traced its path across the Ozarks, lighting the way westward. Inside, the air conditioner hummed in the old turn-of-the-century alley block home, stirring the voile curtains. A hundred years, four hundred years hence, I hope the Ozarks people will still be here, still freedom-loving, still recalcitrant, still hopeful, still compassionate. And I hope I had something to do with that, even if I am a “furriner” Yankee boy from Illinois.