Embodying Rurality in Nonrural Places | Christopher Worthman

 I live in Chicago. I’ve lived there for over forty years.

I live among high rises and along crowded streets. I navigate parking restrictions and rush hour commutes. I wake to sirens in the middle of the night and wait seemingly forever for the next bus. And within a fifty-yard radius of my home there are two to three times more people than were in the small town in which I grew up.

Now, as when I was growing up, I’m annoyed by snide comments about where I live, particularly disparaging remarks about its schools, especially when they come from outsiders. Where I was once a student, now I’m a teacher. Then as now, I know the heart blood of a place is its schools. And as Chicago Public Schools imparts its youth with a love of the city, my public education did the same for me but of a different place. I was raised to be a child of rurality, immersed in its landscape and raised in the belief it was the best of what life offered. 

So while I’m now a proud Chicagoan, I’m a son of the country, small c. I was raised in a small Indiana town among cornfields and creeks. I spent summers detasseling corn and falls baling hay. I fished creek bottoms for crappie and blue gill and trapped along riverbanks for muskrats and raccoons. I rode my bike on country roads to mow lawns the size of football fields. I planted and harvested garden vegetables and had a hand in butchering chickens and preparing pigs and steers for slaughter, winter food all. 

I went to a consolidated high school that pulled in kids from three small towns and surrounding farms. If you weren’t a farmer’s kid,  you were probably an auto plant worker’s child. Either way, you had to rise early in the morning to catch a bus, as your parents turned to farmwork or drove twenty or more miles to a factory in a city.

For me, a city was any place large enough to have more than one high school and diverse enough to warrant the admonition, “unsafe after dark.” The darker side of rural existence, however, wasn’t unfamiliar places but what resided in the hearts of many of us, what we often believed and espoused to family and neighbors about others. I would learn later that the most dangerous places after dark were “sundown towns,” those small towns where anyone not White wasn’t safe after dark. 

What I learned, too, over time is that our darker side isn’t a product of place, especially of rural place, so much as it is of experience or lack thereof, both real and vicarious. What bonds and subsequently separates rural folks from city folks is how little we know about one another and how few the opportunities are to change that.

For many years, I didn’t give much thought to my upbringing other than to escape it. But it was always there in what I valued, how I made sense of experience, and most noticeably, how I talked. 

During my first years of teaching, my students—all African American males from Chicago’s west side—would often say I sounded “country.” My accent could best be described as soft and slow, marked by elongated vowels and a limited range of inflection, not quite southern but clearly not Chicagoan and not urban African American. Being the only teacher and the White man in the room, I sensed students’ bottled up desire to laugh at me. If only they could have turned the tables and reversed history to get a smidge of revenge for what their parents, grandparents, and kin before them faced, what they themselves were facing, when it came to language use. They couldn’t because of that same history.

I told them I only sounded funny (my word, not theirs) because I sounded different, but yes, they were on to something. I used words, turns of phrases, pronunciations, and syntactical preferences different than theirs because of where I was raised and maybe most importantly what I experienced. 

I pointed out how they sounded different from me and asked why they spoke as they did. After convincing them that, no, it wasn’t because they didn’t know how to speak proper English, that in fact they were speaking a rule-driven English, they took a deep interest in what many of us take for granted: not only how we use language but from our use originates and what is says about us. It didn’t hurt that we were reading excerpts from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and would soon be immersed in free verse poetry, with which the closest-to-real-life uses of language are celebrated. 

These mirrors on their lives—the ones they read and the ones they held up to themselves and neighbors—helped my students understand that the way they spoke was not only an act of naming experience but also a way of validating it while scrutinizing their and others’ perceptions on it. 

And lo and behold, they turned the questions back on me. “Why do you say crick?” “Why couldn’t you walk to school?” “Why weren’t there any Black kids in your class?” Well, there were two among a hundred or so of us. “Why so few?” My sounding country became more than an oddity or a sidebar of hilarity. It became entrée into a life with which they were unfamiliar: White rural midwestern.

It wasn’t, however, until we read M.C. Higgins, the Great, by Virginia Hamilton, that their own world of possibilities washed (or warshed?) back onto them. I don’t remember how far into the novel we were before Bryant, an eighth grader, broke the silence of silent reading and said, “What? Wait. Are these people Black?”

“Naw, man, they’re hill people?” Javon said, without looking up from his book.

What was obvious to me, and what Virginia Hamilton left largely tacit, is the Higgins were a rural African American family, the descendants of runaway slaves, owners of a mountain, faced with the destruction of that mountain by strip mining. Bryant’s epiphany: They are Black like me yet not like me. Although they weren’t going to lose a mountain to environmental desecration, my students understood what that type of loss meant, at least intuitively. Their neighborhood was marked by large swaths of vacant lots and boarded up buildings, remnants of a people’s and a city’s response to Martin Luther King’s death twenty-five years earlier. 

What they didn’t understand was why there were African Americans in Appalachia. The revelation wasn’t a mirror. It was a window and with a little more context became a sliding glass door. 

Of course, as my students came to realize, M.C. and his family are in southern Ohio because when Sarah escaped slavery she had to cross the Ohio River. Of course Sarah lived in the country. She had been a slave on a plantation. That’s the environment she knew. That’s what she wanted. Of course M.C. and his family wanted to save their mountain and home. It was what had defined them as African Americans. It was their place, of course.

The purpose of our reading and the nature of our discussions shifted dramatically in pursuit of trying to understand these whys and what it meant to be African American in rural America. Of course, I wasn’t left unaffected. Students’ questions about my language use and my upbringing gave them a window into that world too. For me, answering those questions required me to look in the mirror. Revealed was how the places of my childhood made me who I am today.