Brackett Field Park, Minneapolis
In Tom Wolfe’s 1940 autobiographical novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, a young white man moves to New York City and then returns to the South, where he no longer feels like he belongs. I was assigned his book in 1975 at Oberlin College when I was a 17-year-old freshman. Having spent formative years in both North Carolina and the Northeast, the book agitated me. In class, I argued that despite his feelings, Wolfe still accepted the racist hierarchy of his homeland. I questioned the book’s worth and asked the professor why we didn’t read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye instead—a novel that takes place in Loraine, Ohio, eleven miles from Oberlin.
I got a B- in that class. I quit Oberlin after that semester ended. Still 17, I moved to Minneapolis, got a waitress job. I signed up for a full schedule of modern dance classes, intent on pursuing my artistic dream.
For 48 years, I had a bittersweet relationship with the city; I found my love, had a child, and found community there. I also experienced attacks, rejections, resentments, and persistent blues. Early on, I joined an Anonymous group, looking for a way to feel better. One of the AA mantras is that there is no geographical cure. When I wanted to escape Minneapolis, I would remember that and try to hold on.
In 2011/12 I did get away for 14 months. I cycled the perimeter of the US with my spouse. The experience, while not a remedy for all that ailed me, was healing in many ways, leading me to question the veracity of the AA aphorism. Cure of no cure, I got a taste for living on the road. with a partner that shared my passion. A decade later, when we retired, we decided to feed our wanderlust. We sold our home and gave away our possessions, put what we could carry in backpacks, and began a life on the run.
It was not the contents of Wolfe’s book, but the title that was on my mind when I returned to Minnesota for a visit, after a year away. After a year in 19 countries, we returned “home” for a visit. I was nervous. How would it feel to be in Minneapolis without a place to live that was ours or a plan to stay? Would anyone want to see me? Would I want to stay? I made sure we had reservations for the next six months of travel, as though the town itself would suck me back in if I didn’t have a planned exit.
The return was as emotional as I imagined, but in different ways. We saw 1/3 of the people we wanted to see and did a quarter of what we planned to do. Much time was spent on healthcare. We attended our nephew’s wedding. Our child Emily came and caught COVID. David and I never tested positive, but we curtailed our time with others in case we did.
I thought it would be hard to see the house we lived in for 30 years, but it wasn’t. I felt removed, like it belonged to someone else—which it does. What made me weepy was walking to old haunts: the creek, the holding pond, the grocery store, the café, sitting on a favorite park bench, watching a blue heron walk on water. We joined the parade circling the Bde Maka Ska at dusk. We also walked lakes Phalen, Wildwood, White Bear, Como, Powderhorn, and Harriet. We crossed the Mississippi River and followed the path along Minnehaha Creek.
We traversed the Cities on foot: the wide boulevards of Bloomington, past signs supporting police, and George Floyd’s name woven into a fence. In South Minneapolis, we visited George Floyd Square, and the 37th Street Say Their Names Cemetery, honoring souls killed by police in the US. We attended a small pro-Palestine protest in Powderhorn Park and met beloved friends at May Day Café.
Movement Photographer King Demetrius Pendleton’s Gallery in George Floyd Square.
We walked from Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul to meet the Twin Cities Labor Chorus, taking a diagonal from 4th and 46th Streets South to the river at Franklin Avenue, crossing the Mississippi into Prospect Park, onto University Ave. Walking these familiar paths, I sensed indelible ownership. Where my foot falls is mine and nobody can take that away from me—not even me.
During our visit, the lilacs were blooming! Deep purple, white, and lavender. Lilacs are a Minnesota sign of spring. Nothing is more beautiful or smells as sweet. We had a bush that grew as tall as the house. Back in the day, before we had a house or a bush, David and I would steal lilacs and put them on our table for each other’s May birthdays. Walking by our former home, I saw purple blossoms envelop the roof! Beautiful, yet an ominous sign of a climate in flux.
There were still homeless encampments. I found this social neglect newly shocking. Everywhere I had been, inequality was the primary ill, but nowhere did we see people without homes in the numbers that we have in this city, rich in Fortune 500 companies and non-profits. I saw people living outside in Paris, Dublin, and Lisbon, and many people living by handouts in Cadiz, Spain, but no place leaves people without homes in the winter ice and summer heat like Minneapolis. (Here in Istanbul, where I write, our host told us homelessness is nearly nonexistent. I was skeptical. After two weeks, I am starting to believe him.)
In some ways, the more things have changed, the more they have returned to old patterns. This summer, a Jewish Israeli scholar of genocide was offered a job in the Center for Holocaust and Gender Studies at the University of Minnesota. The offer was rescinded when Professor Segal used his scholarship to analyze genocide in Gaza. This outrage made me think of Michael McConnell. He and his husband were the first gay couple to be legally married in the US. In 1970, he also came to the University of Minnesota to fulfill a job offer, only to have the University Library rescind it because he was openly gay. Lucky for Minneapolis, the Hennepin County Library hired Michael. This time, unfortunately, the Twin Cities lost their chance of being enriched by Professor Raz Segal. If the Israeli had stayed, he would have found fertile ground for collaboration with progressive thinkers and doers in our community. The activism in the Twin Cities is the other reason it will always be (a) home to me.
I am finishing this essay days after the disastrous US elections. What can I offer?
- I do not recommend that everyone leave the US. The world is full of greed and corruption. The struggle is always and everywhere. However, a change of scenery can indeed transform your perspective. Travel does remind one that the United States is a part of a big world, even though its two major political parties deny it. We are one planet, one ocean made up of many seas, one land made of many continents, one people facing the crunch of climate end-times. In all corners of our small world, we desperately need a redistribution of the wealth, a full disarmament, and a radical plan to secure our grandchildren’s future.
- Change is gonna come, and it will be good and bad. What we do makes a difference, though we may never know how.
- When you are young and leave home to find yourself, you may indeed not be able to return because you have changed too much. If however, you run away when you are in your 60s, no matter how far you go, no matter how many other places you will call home, you may never be able to completely uproot. Minneapolis— land of lakes and contradictions— you are forever in my heart.
- Lilac blossoms are as beautiful in October as they are in May.
I write this from a corner café in Istanbul, a block from our apartment. Already when we venture into another neighborhood or take a ferry to a nearby island, I am relieved to be back to this geography of several blocks in Kadıköy, a neighborhood in Istanbul that, after fourteen days, I have already claimed as mine—in the same way that this stray Turkish kitten claimed me for its own.
