Red State Blues

by Martha Bayne

  The inability to think critically and course correct when faced with facts seems part of a larger cognitive dissonance. Here are Jews with a painful history of genocide and persecution falling prey to the same hate-fueled rhetoric and scapegoating used against their own people a generation ago. As if they themselves are not immigrants, refugees born in foreign countries who came here seeking a better future. As if they are not intimately acquainted with religious intolerance that rounded up and killed off their families. As if they have ascended to some higher plane of Americanism, and the past doesn’t matter. Dayenu.

  My father’s Republicanism, I could handle. Our disagreements about health care, taxation, school waivers, environmental protections—these were normal, logical debates that occasionally flared my passions but largely came down to academic differences of opinion. The current climate, with its rising tide of hate, anger, and intolerance, now goes beyond politics as usual.

  In supporting this administration, my father’s family has become complicit in its hate speech, misinformation, and persistent othering of Muslims, immigrants, and other minorities. I have to assume support for Trump is support for the wall, for deportations, for the Muslim registry and travel ban, for the narrowing and sullying of what it means to be an American. My father and his wife, whose families both fled persecution, now can’t help but participate in the casual persecution of others.

  I can almost understand how rural white America could feel this way, alienated and angry and afraid—it makes sense for folks so insulated to fear outsiders. What I can’t wrap my head around is the same ignorance and intolerance espoused by children of Holocaust survivors and Russian Jewish refugees. The Jewish people are intimately involved in the story of persecution. It is deeply woven into our histories and identities as Jews. To ignore where we came from, what we went through, and to actively wish it upon others, goes against the very fabric of what it means to be Jewish—and American.

  I view our modern political climate through a uniquely Jewish lens. The house I live in was owned by Holocaust survivors who sealed up the milk chute and installed five separate deadbolts on the back door. Now, the threat of a Muslim registry brings up images of sewed-on stars. The president of the United States claims that Islam hates us and calls for a religious test to enter the country … to a roar of claps and cheers. As a Jew, I’m chilled by all-too-familiar horror. If I were Muslim, I’d be hiding under my bed. I fear my father, in standing by his party and his vote, by refusing to speak out and by readily absorbing Trump’s rhetoric, is enabling the exact brand of hate that murdered our own people not so long ago.

  I don’t believe my father is a hateful person. But the fact remains that he voted for racism, for xenophobia and Islamophobia and the arrogance of “America First.” Perhaps he was duped by alternative facts, by misleading statistics, by fear-mongering and propaganda. Or perhaps he felt a fever pitch of fear and hatred toward minorities was an acceptable byproduct of a conservative agenda. Perhaps, because it’s a different group at the wrong end of Trump’s wrath, a group that doesn’t include him and his own, it doesn’t seem like a problem. History has shown what happens when hateful rhetoric becomes commonplace, when it is not challenged, and no one is blameless. It is our responsibility as Jews to honor the legacy of the Holocaust and our history of persecution, to stand up, to not be silent, to never forget.

  Sitting at the dinner table, I realize that I sort of hope Christopher Columbus was a secret Jew (I’m less bothered by the syphilis). In a time when Spain turned its back on its Jewish populace, our hero Christopher

  Columbus, the theory goes, was looking for a haven in the New World, a place where his people would be safe to practice their religion. He imagined a country built for immigrants, for refugees, for the persecuted, for people in search of religious freedom—a diverse and welcoming nation.

  Though, if it’s true that Columbus was a secret Jew, I suppose it follows that somewhere along the line, he lost the thread, and forgot what he’d originally set out to do. He sailed to the New World in search of refuge for his people, but was swayed instead by riches and a bloody campaign to keep the godless natives in line. Just like my Jewish family, who fled Eastern Europe only to be consumed with fear and mistrust of immigrants, refugees, and religious minorities, it seems Columbus found in America a new group of people to despise.

  APPALACHIAN YANKEES IN MICHIGAN

  WENDY WELCH

  Call us Appalachian Yankees. My family has spent three generations driving up and down I-75 looking for work someplace between Michigan and Tennessee.

  That’s not the only road some of us have tried to leave. Working class folk descended from mountain Christianity with a capital C: that’s my people. When you look up fundamentalist in the dictionary, you find a picture of Grandma Mattie. In 1937, she and Grandpa Alex abandoned a crossroads general store in Tazewell, Tennessee for a slum-burb in Detroit, where he became a bricklayer and she raised five children.

  The Tazewell church they never left behind didn’t hold with adornment: no curling of the hair, no wedding rings, not even reading glasses. If God hadn’t equipped you with it when you came out of the womb, you didn’t need it. No good ever came of reading too much anyway. The purpose of life was to glorify God and take good care of your family. This is our creed.

  Three out of four aunts agreed, but Aunt Lelah struck out sideways, settling in rural Ohio with a Navy man. No one can explain why this loosened her up a bit, but theirs was the first daughter to show up at the annual Christmas gathering in blue jeans. Scandalized glances fell aplenty, but family is family. In later years two sisters and a brother used Lelah’s house as a stopover en route to destinies of their own as teacher, nurse, and preacher back in the region Mattie and Alex had left the generation before.

  We cousins retraced Grandma and Grandpa’s route back and forth, spreading out into Chicago and a few other offshoots of the 75 corridor, aiming at ever-moving targets of jobs and theology. Sometimes steel mills and college classes proved infertile soil for Tazewell’s brand of Christianity. Some cousins raced through life well above the speed limit aided by an excess of substances; others navigated with caution, compliant to their raising. More or less. Blue jeans gave way to pierced ears, which caused Grandma Mattie to pray until the Christmas ham got cold that first year. But we were still family.

  Grandma’s funeral was well before the 2016 election, and—unbeknownst to us—the last Golden Day. We cried and laughed and sat at the wake eating Aunt Pat’s Orange Delight Bundt Cream Cake and watching the children run. Wedding rings had created a whole new generation with different names but the same faces we remembered from childhood. We knew they would inherit our family creed and Aunt Pat’s cake recipe along with those faces: glorify God; do right by your flesh and blood; avoid curling irons; cream the eggs and butter together before adding them to the dry ingredients.

  By the time we gathered again to say goodbye to the first of the uncles, years had passed and we needed more than eggs to bind us. At the wake, the now-adult children of cousins, working their way through graduate school or a steel mill, offered jokes wrapped around baited hooks.

  “That March of Women abomination in D.C. got more people walking than Michelle Obama ever did! Ha! Seriously though, he’s gonna drain the swamp.”

  “You mean drain the Federal Reserves, don’t you? Do you know how much golf he’s played since becoming president? And his scores are worse than mine! Haha!”

  The fundamentals felt the same—take care of your own, do what God says—but carefully manicured nails and upswept curly hair dominated the room. The Aunts passed each others’ great-grandchildren back and forth and kept silence against their granddaughters in business suits. The granddaughters responded by twisting their wedding rings and sharing about the churches they had settled into back home—home being everything from Hugeopolis to Nowhereville along I-75. Churches where “family” meant ALL God’s children, red and blue, black and white. They spoke o
f living wages at $15 per hour, single payer healthcare systems, and staying out of Walmart.

  Their cousins who worked in what Tazewell had become, who had fled Flint and given up homesteading in Detroit after a bullet lodged in their Valu-Village stove, grimaced and said they’d have been glad to have a Walmart near them, all that time they were trying to rebuild a country ruined by entitlement. They narrated first-person experiences that proved God hated freeloaders. A family took care of its own. A real family, at least.

  The Orange Delight cake stayed on its plate because half the room were on a plant-based diet after hearing a TED talk about the links between global warming and personal health, and the other half were diabetic from eating out in Hazard, Kentucky.

  The aunts could see what was happening, so they did what Appalachian Yankees do in times of crisis.

  “Y’all quit that politics talk and get over here and finish up this ham. We’re fambly,” said Aunt Evelyn.

  “It can be difficult to understand God’s word in the context of today’s challenges.” Aunt Edna shoved paper plates of Orange Delight into our hands as she spoke. “But you can’t argue with your mouths full. Eat.”

  Aunt Lelah looked sideways at Aunt Edna. “God’s word never changes.”

  Aunt Edna blinked, fork halfway to her mouth. Her granddaughter Sally answered instead. “No, but life’s circumstances do, and God gave us brains for a reason.”

  Uncle Ernie jabbed his plastic fork at Sally. “We must not question God’s word. It tells us that Earthly governments are ordained by God.”

  Cousin Alannis rolled her eyes and opened her mouth. Within ten minutes, people were leaving. I think it will be the last time I’ll ever see some of them. We will tell ourselves that this is the way family works, breaking down into smaller units after the loss of Grandma Mattie. That time’s inevitable march dictates the aunts become matriarchs of their own tribes. We will not allow ourselves to believe that anything else happened here, this day we didn’t know would not be golden with family and Bundt cake.

  God love Cousin Alannis with her MBA and spiked heels. In her life, in the lives of her brothers and sisters, respect never became a word that shielded others from consequences. God bless Cousin Sally in her long denim skirt and sneakers, yards of poker-straight hair piled atop a head full of brains; she taught her nine children to question everything, just like she’d been doing since age three.

  Did the women at wakes and weddings those hot summer days in 1860s Tazewell think similar things, gluing their layer to the Apple Stack Cake built family by family, each adding a piece to the whole? Did they watch the heat storms roll toward them from the edge of the valley, listen to trapped thunder beat itself to death against the mountain walls, and hear warnings of what was coming? When they prayed for rain, perhaps it was to cool the land and grow peace in their families, while brothers argued states rights over picnic tables laden with food and cousins spit watermelon seeds at each other across the creek. Maybe they prayed for the safety of cousins gone north, whom they would never see again.

  When did they know seeds would turn to bullets? When did they recognize that even families come apart at the seams so carefully sewn for generations by advice at the breakfast table, through careful introductions of cherished daughters to boys with no plans to move away, with recipes in scrawling script on scraps of paper stuck between pages of college textbooks for grandchildren headed toward The City?

  The aunts looked defeated as they gathered up plates of uneaten Orange Delight from around the room. It is not an expression I am used to seeing on these faces my family have been sharing for so long.

  Politics is one thing, family another. How much power does a president have, to reach into the very hearts of people and turn watermelon seeds into bullets?

  FROM MACOMB COUNTY TO DETROIT CITY

  AMANDA LEWAN

  We moved into our first house together. The house is a big colonial with a brick face and navy blue shutters. White columns stand in front of a red door. Two large flower pots sit empty and peeling. The porch is a pedestal waiting for our arrival, and arriving at first feels grand.

  “A red door stands for prosperity,” a friend says when I show her a photo.

  “Good. We’re going to need it,” I say.

  Three stories is far too large for the two of us and three dogs, but it’s the smallest house we could find in the neighborhood we chose, Detroit’s historic Boston Edison area. I have never been one to want to own things. I don’t dream of houses and linens and other homely things. But if I did dream, then this house would be it. I love everything from the glass doorknobs and original keyholes to the cornice edges around each window, etched white and sealed in light grey walls. It feels like a place of lightness.

  Moving in, however, does not feel so light. I carry a bag of emotions with me, one not well-packed and wrapped in too much silver lining.

  I grew up in Macomb County, north of Detroit. That is where, as a child, I enjoyed a good school system and dance classes and band practice. It’s also the county that went red in 2016 for the first time in over a decade, tipping the state in a heated election year and becoming a national symbol of white working class frustration. It’s the county with “Trump” plastered on nearly every car and billboard. This is the county that shot down our region’s public transit proposal, the county that seems to want to stay set apart. A majority white county, outside a majority black city. This is the county I come from but do not call home.

  Members of my family spent their entire lives trying to get out of the city in which we had just purchased our new house. They leave for logical reasons: better schools, better jobs, safety, cities with more opportunity. It was once a symbol of success if a family member got out of Detroit, knowing something better was supposed to be around the corner. My uncle moved to the country beyond the suburbs; an aunt moved to Macomb. One cousin couldn’t find a job working in the city during the recession and moved to Atlanta instead. Jobs in the city of Detroit are so few and far between that 64% of Detroit residents commute to work outside the city, and residents have little access to public transportation that is reliable and speedy. Perhaps you saw the story about the man who walked 20 miles to finish his morning work commute? My grandma is the only one who still stays in her home of 50 years on Detroit’s east side. She has retired but not moved out. She was the only one left until I moved in.

  I ask my dad what he thinks of the house.

  “It’s a nice house,” he says.

  There are no fatherly warnings. No stories from his twenty years of boarding up abandoned homes in the city. No reminders of the times guns were pulled out on him, and drugs were found in the way of his work while he was doing his job. No comments of our block of beauty surrounded by what most see as blight, streets of emptiness that he used to try and fight. He closed down his construction business many years ago. He works as a janitor. He voted twice for Obama and surprised me when he voted for Trump, believing in the dream that things were better in the past. He points to things he likes about the house, buys the moving crew of brothers their lunch, and leaves without leaving approval.

  Right next door to us the house is empty, but not really. Cars sit in the driveway and backyard. Plants remain scattered around as if someone lives there. Our house was similar to that one too, owned by a family holding on. No one was living in it, but the owners kept it until it until a neighbor made an offer, took its shell, and infused it with necessities, made it a home again.

  I wonder how many drive by our neighborhood and see blight? How many see opportunity? How many dream of the past?

  Next to us a piece of plywood stays wedged in a window; two white circles and a small half-moon are painted on it. It is smiling at us over a hole that is empty inside. I am sitting across from it from my brand new kitchen island drinking my fresh coffee. It is smiling at me from across the way. I want to smile back. History can’t be shut up with plywood.

  I ask my aunt: Why leave Detro
it?

  I ask my uncle: Why leave Detroit?

  I ask my mom: Why leave Detroit?

  I ask my grandma: Why stay?

  I do not ask my father anything.

  Two old friends come to visit. They are moving into their first home together soon, too. We walk through every room of our new house, talking and catching up. The men are insisting on family donated furniture while the women want to add their own touch. Then, at the end there is a subtle ask. They are settling down in a neighborhood outside the city where this question would not come up. But there’s much unsettled here, empty, abandoned, and it’s past dark. They ask: What’s the best way to get out of here?

  How do we get out of here? That is not the question I want to ask myself but: How did we get here? And how do we get back together?

  Like my grandma, I am set apart in my ways. We have found our home and we will stay here for what I hope will be another fifty years. I think of all my relatives spread out across our divided region. I want to bring them back, one by one, to be a closer family and a closer region. I sit in my second story office writing this where I am surrounded by the trees. In it is the silence of a sky opened up around me. In this space I hope for possibility. In this city I hope we can all return to as home someday.

  KICK ASS: MY DAD, THE AMERICAN DREAM, AND DONALD TRUMP

  ANGELA ANAGOST REPKE

  “Kick ass.”

  This was my dad’s sign-off and direct order at the end of his letters to my three brothers and me while we were in college and into young adulthood. His letters were usually scribed on his yellow legal pads. They would include some Greek philosophical quote like “everything in moderation,” or a gritty, yet quirky anecdote of his own, like this one:

  My Dear Children,

  I guess it’s time for more stuff on my life.

  I do not recall much about the seventh grade except that I was still working at the restaurant on the weekends—the late shift from 10:30-3:00 in the morning.