Red State Blues

by Martha Bayne

  And on this or any other picture-perfect summer Saturday, motorcycles from wherever are rolling down the street and the sidewalks are busy with people from wherever hanging out, people who don’t live here but come on the weekend to walk around and check the place out, and maybe buy something and catch a taste of culture and lifestyle that they won’t see anywhere else in southwestern Ohio between Columbus and Cincinnati, except maybe in the hipper parts of Dayton. (Some residents prefer to steer clear of downtown when the tourists invade.)

  Truly, Yellow Springs is a different kind of place. It’s garnered accolades galore: Coolest Small Town; Best of the Road Most Fun Town; Most Amazing Place in the Midwest to Retire; and more. It is entirely possible to spend a week or an hour there and fall in love with the coolness, the quiet, the vibe. You could take in all the offerings from shop to shop, or the Prince mural in the alley behind the Xenia Avenue businesses, or the eclectic housing stock of improvised add-ons, works of art and McMansions (those are on the south end of town, an area some call “the suburbs”), and come to feel that you’re in a bubble. A precious, cozy little bubble, where not only time but attitudes remain rooted in a post-hippie aesthetic, both cultural and political. A bubble where the mean old outside world, with its relative lack of progressive trappings-per-capita and abundance of fast-food joints, does not exist. A bubble where the name Donald Trump is hardly ever uttered unless accompanied by hand-wringing, or obscenities, or both. Yes, you could get lost inside that bubble, and not mind it one single bit.

  But bubbles can be deceptively seductive places. Beyond the bubble, life is markedly different. The area surrounding Yellow Springs—nondescript towns like Fairborn, Clifton and Xenia—is considerably further downscale. The opioid crisis looms over those landscapes, partly a result of the utter lack of economic opportunity. Nearby is Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, whose only real connection to Yellow Springs is through the town’s exemplary school system, which attracts numerous families with young children (which, in its way, has driven up housing prices far beyond most neighboring towns and ‘burbs). It all adds up: while Yellow Springs (population 3,500) voted 89 percent for Hillary Clinton, the rest of Greene County voted 64 percent for Trump.

  As you might expect with numbers like that, villagers walked around in a collective fog after the election. But Yellow Springs soon recovered its post-hippie swagger, and redoubled the will to maintain its quirky progressivism. Most helpful to that effort was a swiftly arranged live broadcast at the movie theater of the post-election Saturday Night Live hosted by Dave Chappelle, the town’s most famous resident.

  But not long after the election, that deceptively seductive blue bubble was pierced—from within.

  Like in Times Square, Yellow Springs drops a ball at midnight to ring in the New Year. But seeing as how there are no skyscrapers there, the ball descends from atop the hardware store in the middle of downtown. It’s a pleasant event that draws folks from around the area; no other nearby town does anything special for New Year’s Eve.

  Most years, the event is pretty laid-back, like Yellow Springs itself, and the street is clear by about 12:30 or so. But not at the dawn of 2017. For some reason, police cruisers began blaring sirens and pinching off Xenia Avenue from opposite directions at 12:08, causing mass confusion in a two-block area. The noise was deafening, children were scared. No one could understand why this was happening, since the crowd would have dispersed peaceably on their own with limited nudging, just as they’d always done. They also couldn’t understand why police cruisers were showing up from surrounding jurisdictions.

  At one point, a black man ran up to one of the cruisers, banging on the door to get the (white) police officer’s attention. For his efforts at trying to extract some sense from the madness, he ended up in a wrestling match with the officer and almost got tased. And then he was arrested, charged with felony obstruction and an additional misdemeanor (a Village Council representative, a seventy-two-year-old white woman, was later charged with two misdemeanors).

  The taser got lost amidst the ruckus, which went on for almost an hour. But the damage had been done. Idyllic, quirky Yellow Springs had its very own police misconduct crisis, taking its place among the Chicagos, Clevelands, and Baltimores of the nation.

  Three nights later, villagers and TV stations packed the community center for a quickly-called Village Council meeting. The meeting began with the announcement of the police chief falling on his sword (he was not on duty during the incident) and tendering his resignation. That did not appease the dozens of people who gave impassioned statements decrying the behavior of the police. Some even went so far, this being Yellow Springs and all that, as to call for the total disarming of the police and reorientation of them as “peace officers.”

  But there was another current running through the comments. Residents gave accounts of previous aggressive policing in recent years. Some became emotional in recounting what had happened to a loved one. Villagers had been troubled by an increasingly non-Yellow Springsian tenor to the police, and the town’s Human Relations Commission had attempted to mediate concerns throughout 2016, but not until the New Year’s Eve incident did the concerns become a front-and-center issue for the village.

  And that’s not all that blew up. Many of those on the business end of hard policing were young people of color, who felt themselves singled out and targeted. Their concerns, as it turned out, went insidiously deeper than just bad encounters with the law.

  Two weeks later, at the village’s annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day commemoration (a silent march through town, culminating in a choir concert), a black middle school student read her prize-winning essay, or at least did her best to make her way through it. She recounted the way some of her classmates treated her, calling her “monkey” and making other references to how they thought people who looked like her resembled animals. She was too overcome by the hurtfulness of the scene to finish the essay; someone else finished reading it for her. The audience, appalled by the events she described and moved by her courage to describe them, gave her a standing ovation.

  But even that would not be the end of it. Later that afternoon, several young people met with a New York Times reporter to talk about their experiences. The reporter had ties to Yellow Springs, and found out about the New Year’s Eve incident via a Facebook friend. The students told him about their treatment across the town, by shopkeepers as well as police and classmates. They described a sense of being invisible, which would seem to be hard to happen in a place this small. They were accompanied by members of The 365 Project, a local group working to address racial relations and understandings in the village.

  That such a group would be necessary seems at odds with Yellow Springs’ bonafides. The town was founded in a spirit of early 19th Century progressivism (and also tourism even then, as the town’s namesake water supply drew folks from miles around in search of its healing qualities). To this day, there is a remarkable diversity of faith communities, from traditional religions to Baha’i, Buddhist. and Quaker; the only place of worship missing is a mosque. Horace Mann chose Yellow Springs as the home of the pioneering college he envisioned, settling Antioch College there in 1852. Ever since then, Antioch’s progressive bent (first to allow women to present their academic work, first to hire women as faculty, and many other achievements) went hand-in-hand with Yellow Springs’ essential self-definition as a place where all were welcome.

  Except when they weren’t. After World War II, blacks working at the Air Force base and other neighboring companies found it hard to find places to live in Yellow Springs. Eventually a new housing development, a cul-de-sac of ranch houses known as Omar Circle, became the village’s first black neighborhood. In the ‘60s, a major conflagration ensued after a white barber refused to cut a black man’s hair, claiming he didn’t know how; eventually the barber closed his shop.

  Despite these incidents, Yellow Springs maintained its reputation as a tolerant community, with a healthy population of
black professionals, educators and business owners. Two churches, First Baptist and Central Chapel A.M.E, served them. The police chief in the ‘70s and ‘80s was a still-beloved black man; a street bears his name as an honorific.

  But as housing prices started rising in the ‘90s and ‘00s, many blacks found themselves priced out of the market and moved out, and other blacks did not move in to replace them. From a peak of about 30 percent, today Yellow Springs’ population is around 12 percent black (and affordable housing remains a challenge).

  And in those intervening years, many blacks came to see the kindness and tolerance Yellow Springs espouses as, if not a lie, then at least a platitude that masked the complicated realities of living inside a deceptively seductive blue bubble that, even if it’s nowhere near the mainstream, is hardly immune from any of the issues bedeviling America. Thus, they were not surprised by the February 5, 2017 Times headline: “A Small Ohio Town Tries to Curb Aggressive Policing.” They were not surprised by the accounts of young black people in the article. And, presumably, they were not surprised by the responses of white residents, which can easily be summarized as “We know we have to do better.”

  For white villagers, the moment became something of an existential crisis. Attendees at a Village Council meeting in March sat raptly as a report on the New Year’s Eve incident, damning the conduct of the police, was read into the public record (Chappelle was there; his comments towards the end went viral). Around that time, the town newspaper ran a series of articles about the nature of local policing—and was called to task by one letter-writer for not having any blacks on its reporting team.

  But in time, the tension dissipated, at least visibly. A new police chief was hired, by all accounts inclined to a community policing approach more in line with civic values. The charges against the black man and the white council member were eventually dropped. Life didn’t get perfect for aggrieved young people of color, but at least the truth was out in the open. Later in the year, a book club was announced; its text was Shelly Tochluk’s Witnessing Whiteness: The Need to Talk about Race and How to Do It.

  Thus was Yellow Springs able to breathe easier, the resilience of its values having carried the day once again. But the cozy blue bubble would soon be pierced again, this time by strangers in its midst.

  Antioch College has a legacy of incubating activists, change agents, and assorted rabble-rousers; Coretta Scott King and Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton are among its alumna (Coretta’s husband gave the commencement address in 1965). Students have historically lent their time and energy to fighting the powers that be; those ranks include Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, two of the three civil rights workers infamously killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1964 for trying to register black people to vote.

  So it was not particularly surprising that three Antioch students went to Charlottesville, VA in the summer of 2017 to counter-protest the “Unite the Right” march. Word got out that they had been there, and they were interviewed by the local news.

  Perhaps it was that flash of notoriety, or Antioch’s historic reputation, or both, or something else entirely, that prompted someone to paste racist leaflets on stop signs around town.

  The only previous defacement of signs was by someone who scribbled “Trump” under the printed “Stop” on several signs across town; the public works department was none too pleased by the graffiti, but months later the signs were still there, and some folks considered them cute. This incident was different, and not cute at all.

  Sometime on a late August 2017 day, several stop signs had been adorned with flyers touting Identity Europa and the National Vanguard, two of the groups who descended upon Charlottesville. They bore messages like “Serve Your People” and “Protect the Family: Reject Degeneracy,” and images of Greek statues. The Mockingbird blog reported that later that day, other fliers were posted on downtown buildings, coincidentally on buildings where folks were meeting to discuss the acts. On the same day, someone saw a pick-up truck bearing stickers for the West Ohio Minutemen parked in the grocery store lot.

  This had people wondering: was the alt-right about to start it up here? Could Yellow Springs be the next Charlottesville?

  For their part, a Minuteman leader denied his group’s responsibility for the fliers. No one came forward with an explanation. There was no further sighting of any such propaganda, and the whole thing had receded back outside the bubble by the end of the week. If the intent was to recruit people from Antioch or Yellow Springs to the alt-right cause, the perpetuators clearly did not do their homework.

  But the incident served as a reminder that Yellow Springs is not surrounded by a moat or a concrete wall. The environs beyond the village boundaries can be treacherous; ask the students at predominantly black Central State University, just down the road in the isolated hamlet of Wilberforce, about the last time they saw Klan activity near campus. The sense for people of color has always been: Yellow Springs may be cool, but be careful after dark on the back roads.

  Indeed, venturing into Xenia or Fairborn is like going into another world. Xenia’s the county seat, yet there’s no downtown to speak of beyond the county buildings, a new eatery or two, and various pawn shops and cheap retail. Fairborn isn’t much better, except for the Kroger superstore near I-675. The people in those and the other nearby towns may be as decent as any, but the tenor of those locales is anything but idyllic and quirky.

  The nearest sign of economic life outside of Yellow Springs is the sprawling bastion of Mallified America along both sides of Fairfield Road in Beavercreek, an exurb between Yellow Springs and Dayton—and the site of the Walmart where John Crawford, a black shopper, was killed by police in 2014 for holding an air rifle on sale in the store (villagers and Antioch folks joined Crawford’s family in a vigil at the store in 2017 to note the third anniversary of the murder).

  Given all that, it’s no wonder Yellow Springs becomes a tourist town on the weekends (and especially during its Street Fairs in the spring and fall). If you want to people-watch the folks with their eccentric hairstyles and fashions, or admire the shops with their original artworks for sale, or have anything approaching a beyond-the-Southwestern-Ohio-norm cultural experience, this is where you venture. The harsh extremes of the broader world will not intrude upon your pleasant day trip into post-hippie kumbaya and commerce.

  And if you have any leftish or countercultural leanings at all, this is the only place for miles in any direction where you feel like you can breathe.

  The end of that picture-perfect summer Saturday took me back down Xenia Avenue, to pick up a few things at the store. One of the local jewelers spotted me across the street, and we shouted a quick chat at each other before the traffic picked back up. The street was still busy, with diners filling up the restaurant patios. That night, I sat on the front stoop of my domicile, and enjoyed the calmness and quiet. The deer weren’t walking about, just the neighborhood black cat across the street. No existential angst about the fate of society, at least not outwardly. Just another serene and charming day, just like so many others there.

  Yes, Yellow Springs, for all its faults and vulnerabilities, is a deceptively seductive blue bubble, and many villagers are proud about it. And yes, the world outside it is scary, and sometimes the world inside it can be scary too. But when the leaves change color in the fall it’s glorious, and no one much thinks about the mean old outside world lurking just beyond the mysterious KIND NESS banners.

  FIBS AND CHEESEHEADS, FROM CHICAGO TO CHETEK.

  BILL SAVAGE

  I first heard the term “FIB” while tending bar on the north side of Chicago in the late 1980s. A few regulars had returned from a fishing trip to some obscure lake town in northwest Wisconsin, and were regaling each other, and everyone else in the place, with epic bullshit tales of huge fish caught during the day and vast quantities of beer downed by night.

  The fish stories I doubted; the beer tales I believed. I’d seen it often enough.

  On
e complained that he didn’t like the attitude those Cheesehead bartenders had about FIBs.

  “FIBs?” I asked.

  “Fucking Illinois Bastards,” another responded.

  A third chimed in, “Yeah, they don’t like us much, but they need our money. We don’t go up there and spend it, their towns die. They know it and they resent it.”

  A few years later, I became one of those FIBs, in that very same obscure town.

  In 1992, my mother and my stepfather, Jerry, bought a cabin on the narrows of Pokegama Lake, in Chetek, Wisconsin. It’s common for Chicagoans to have such getaways. North-siders tend to go to Wisconsin, south-siders to Michigan, which makes sense: when you’re trying to get out of the city, you don’t want to drive all the way across it first.

  My stepfather’s Aunt Hattie and Uncle George had owned a place on a small island in Chetek since the 1950s, and Jerry had been visiting since then, to snowmobile in the winter and fish in the summer. My mom loved the area, but not so much the need to boat on and off the island, so they bought on the mainland.

  The Cabin, as it was inevitably called, had been built by a carpenter who lived in the northwest suburbs. Tucked between two small resorts and a handful of other seasonal buildings, it had two bedrooms, a kitchen/common room, and a screened-in sleeping porch. Out back, a fish house to clean the day’s catch, and a small pond. In front, a wood pile and a fire ring with a grill.

  A three-season place, the cabin had to be shut down for the winter and reopened each spring, and for fifteen years I was part of that opening and closing crew, along with Jerry’s nephew Marty and sometimes his son, Marty Joe. For fifteen years, I travelled north in late spring and again in autumn. The interstate to Eau Claire, then about an hour north on US-53 to Exit 126, County SS into Chetek’s main business strip, 2nd Street. Drive through town, over the New Bridge, into farmland for a half mile or so, then right down a side road over a slough, then left to a driveway paved in pine needles. The pond’s frogs provided a welcoming chorus when I pulled in around dusk.