Copyright 2007-All Rights Reserved
Indiana, in the heart of the Midwest, is shaped like a boot. Bloomington, which is home to Indiana University, is up the road a piece from Evansville, which is at the southwestern quarter of the state: In its boot heel. Remembering Evansville is remembering summer. Summer and banana-cream sunrises. Summer gathering her oven-fired skirts around her as the heat begins to bake you even before morning barely begins. In my memory, Evansville will always be Willie Taylor’s barbeque, Bill’s homemade Chow Chow, Allen’s Lounge, The Paradise, Lincoln and Kentucky Avenues, the University of Evansville (first named Evansville College), Posey County melons, biting into a home-grown tomato, eating fresh-caught blue gills, stopping to watch barges and motor boats plow across the bosom of the Ohio River. Evansville will always be summer. Summer and cornfields roasting under August flame. Summer and vermillion sunsets. I landed in Evansville, which sits on a bend of the meandering Ohio River, after undergrad and grad school at Indiana University. Back then, in 1967, it was a retiring, mid-sized city where ten percent of the 200,000 population was Black. I remember there being one building that might have passed muster as a skyscraper—the Old National Bank, approximately twenty stories high. And there were three newspapers (I wrote a feature column for The Evansville Courier), one four-year college, an Indiana State University extension campus, one modest-sized museum, two exterior shopping centers, one small airport, one bus station, and no passenger train depot. You could drive in a couple of hours on two-lane highways to Louisville, Kentucky, to Cincinnati, Ohio, or to St. Louis, Missouri. If you wanted to go to Indianapolis, which is in the middle of the state, it would take a bit more drive time. The thing I remember right off about Evansville is that the streets there had German names that I couldn’t pronounce. (The spelling and pronunciation were quite foreign to me, being from the South and all where the names are quite vanilla-plain.) The original settlers that turned Evansville into more than just a river landing for trade goods were, I found out later, German, Irish, Jewish, and British immigrants. And that included, according to the history books, people on the run from war or famine or the law, people kicked out of Europe for being who they were, and poor folk trudging west to find a home.
When I first visited Evansville, in the mid sixties, I’d been invited for the weekend by a fellow student who’d lived there all of her life. As we drove into town that afternoon, I almost ran over Ron Glass (the actor) who leaped out into Lincoln Avenue (which was the main drag in the Black part of town) as if he had bumpers on his behind. He flagged us down and bounded over to the driver’s side of my car. He asked whose car we were riding in. Ron, a student himself at Evansville College, stared at me while I was being introduced, nodded his recognition of me, then proceeded to chatter away. At the time, I thought he was fiercely handsome, brash and a little overbearing. (When it comes to being brash and overbearing, I’d have to say it takes one to know one.) God only knows what he thought of me though we soon got to be friends. Of course that was before he graduated and left Evansville for the actor's life in New York and, eventually, in Los Angeles where he landed a starring role in the television series, “Barney Miller.”
Eventually, I ended up living in Evansville. The how and why of that is a tale for a winter’s eve around the fire. Suffice to say, for the moment, that the circumstances were messy. Full of high drama…which, for me, during those days, most likely meant I was running from something. I was. In fact, I was running from several things. All at the same time. And Evansville looked like a convenient hideout.
(I’ll let you in on just a few tidbits to keep you interested and tempt you to read more in Mee Street II when that book comes out in the future.)
By the time I got around to living in Evansville, I was out of graduate school, carrying a torch for a woman named Stacey, trying to find my balance, bewildered and lost because Mama had died and Daddy had remarried. (His new wife and I never saw eye to eye though that didn’t keep me from going home from time to time.)
I mention all this to say that by the time I stumbled out of graduate school, I was broken-hearted, grieving, rudderless, and entirely without focus or direction. My mother was no longer around to point me in a direction she thought I ought to go. Which meant that I was without the navigator I’d always depended on. The love of my life…the woman whom I had desperately wished to skip down the road of life with was now traveling a path that I could not follow. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I had gotten the requisite degrees. Now, something was supposed to happen. Something like living my life. Something like living happily ever after.
Something like getting a job. But what kind? Where? And how? While I was in my last semester of graduate school, somebody said something about a job referral bank on campus. I checked it out. There was a teaching position in Ohio at Wilberforce College and I had experience with teaching in college. I was teaching, while getting my Master's, as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the English Department at I.U.
So. Okay, I said to myself. I’ll apply. But I needed a resume. A soror helped me piece one together. We didn’t exactly know what we were doing and we didn’t know anybody to ask about these things but we muddled through. WE put it together and I mailed it off. Then, I waited. And waited. And waited. And started to panic. School was ending in sixty days and I didn’t have any place to go. Didn’t have a job.
My brain had gone into meltdown mode and I couldn’t figure out what to do. All I could think was that everyone I had loved had gone away from me. I didn’t know how to handle the emotions…the grief. They were raging inside me. Mama was dead. Stacey had kicked me to the curb. Daddy had married a woman who was…well, let’s just say he deserved better. (But I don't think he knew that.)
So I couldn’t go home. Wouldn’t.
Then, I visited Evansville. And while visiting that first time, I saw Evansville College. It was a nice little campus. Postage stamp small compared to the leviathan, Indiana University. It was suggested that I apply there for a teaching position. I did. They had absolutely no faculty or staff of color. And the pressure was on, by the late sixties, to hire a Black face. They hired mine. I became the first Black, full-time (but not tenure track) instructor there. They gave me a year to year contract. No security in the contract but I didn’t understand the ins and outs of all that anyway. I grabbed the offer.
And so began my deep, long sleep in a cave called Evansville, Indiana. A sleep that was full shadows and specters pale as death. A sleep always haunted by nightmares. A sleep that went on for fourteen-years.
(end)
