Red State Blues

by Martha Bayne

  “In college, I was a nationally ranked bronc-rider, and up in Minot, North Dakota my horse flipped over on me in the chute. I was paralyzed instantly.”

  Baby blue placards with Billie’s name in yellow wave around the yard and hang from the hay bales on stage, adjacent the American flag, but “Democrat” doesn’t appear anywhere. Days earlier a few hours to the west, Montanans elected a Republican who body-slammed a journalist over a banjo-picking Democrat. The week before, at a bar in Ft. Pierre, a progressive man considering a run for the state legislature told me over beers that he wanted to run as a Republican in his deeply conservative district of central Sioux Falls.

  “Democrats get crushed,” he said. “I want to move the conversation from here to here.”

  His hands wavered over the bar, like two needles on an old pick-up truck. I’ve heard this before around here.

  “You get accustomed to losing,” a Democrat from Yankton County, the old territorial capital, told me. He’s considering running for the state legislature, too. “Democrats want to be martyrs. They get used to losing, and they forget how to win. You don’t win by being a purist.”

  The previous fall, a computer programmer—Jay Williams—lost to incumbent senator John Thune, a Republican, by double-digits. I had listened to a debate on the radio, agreed with everything Williams said, and knew he’d be slaughtered.

  In August, I found myself in the backyard of a retiring theatre and English teacher—a known, rabble-rousing liberal—in a verdant patio with other Democrats. One, a magazine publisher who ran and lost for governor in 1998, told me about living in D.C. during Nixon’s presidency.

  “We were on the Potomac one afternoon during the summer recess, and it was just days before Nixon would resign, and suddenly this big yacht came driving down the channel, and there he was, Nixon, and he looked over and waved.”

  The tempo and direction for the state’s Democrats wavers. A progressive who lives and works out in Rapid City for cattle ranchers told me it doesn’t happen from liberals.

  “It’s not going to be because we’re fighting for trans-rights,” she said. “We need kitchen table issues.”

  A few weeks later, this same woman stuck up for the party’s current chair, who during the annual McGovern Day Dinner faced a coup attempt from supporters of Paula Hawks, who ran last fall against the state’s immensely popular congressional representative, Kristi Noem.

  After Sutton’s event in Bonesteel, South Dakota’s Republican party director called Sutton a “hyper partisan liberal Democrat.” But he’s not. Maybe the best thing a political party can do is get out of its own way.

  At lunch, after Billie’s announcement, I sat with a former state legislator from Wessington Springs—where the black-cowboy-hatted string band opening up the announcement descended from—shared a picnic bench with me, as we sipped lemonade and ate our fruit kabobs and pork sandwiches.

  “I’ve seen it before,” he said, “As Democrats, we just got to wait until the other party screws up.” He took a moment, skewering a piece of pork stuck between his teeth with a toothpick, perhaps pondering the same thought I was.

  A cloud of dust swirled up as a stagecoach—carrying the Sutton family name—pulled up, and some children got out, their hair glowing in the sun dazzling in that blue western sky.

  “And I think we’re getting there. We just have to have one of our own ready.”

  NEIGHBORS

  BRIDGET CALLAHAN

  After the August rally, the atmosphere in Wilmington was weird. September felt violent. There was tension in the air, bumping between people like streams of fleas, or viruses. Everybody’s aura was poisoned. No one felt good about talking to anyone they didn’t know. Strangers were might be your enemy. The polarization of ideas was a tangible, electrical thing, a strange force of psychology as powerful as gravity and physical magnetism.

  There are a lot of transplants in Wilmington. It’s a North Carolina beach town, full of international tourists, and New Yorkers who move south to “get away.” There is a Cleveland Browns tailgating club.

  When I first moved here, I would get pissed when people asked me where I was from.

  “Cleveland.”

  “Oh, my boyfriend is from Cincinnati!”

  Cool. That might as well be an entirely different state. Weird spaghetti-eaters. But a ton of people from Cincy. Lots from New Jersey. A sizable delegation from Illinois.

  For the last two decades, the city has also been chock-full of the film industry, and all those resulting characters. Actresses who taught yoga. Dorky townie gaffer guys. Stunt doubles who taught at surf camps in between jobs, and always the ubiquitous super rich: producers, directors, “artists” who talked gaily at parties about “how, of course, it’s hard being in the South culturally, there’s practically no liberals here, they’re all rednecks, however the tax rates are great.”

  It would be a mistake to think this was a liberal place, some sort of Yankee bastion. The highway was only built forty years ago. Twenty minutes of driving and you are in rural North Carolina, where people sell boiled peanuts by the side of the road and take out second mortgages to buy farm trucks. Maybe the liberals were the people we met at the cocktail bars, but the people not at the bars were the thousands of nice, church-going evangelicals who populated every place outside of downtown. We forgot about them, because we never saw them, except sometimes shopping at Whole Foods if their kid had a gluten allergy, or on the local news when there was a horrible accident and their church was trying to raise money. They weren’t on our Twitter feeds. And they forgot about us, because they didn’t go out to bars, we didn’t come to their church events, and we weren’t on their Twitter feeds either.

  But after Donald Trump came to town we were all, loudly and relentlessly, reminded that we were neighbors.

  I stopped playing with Tinder. I was scared of confrontation, resentful of photos of people in camo, or holding guns, sporting military haircuts, or riding in big trucks with tow-headed children who were making more dignified smiles for the camera than their father, who stuck his tongue out arena-rock style in the background, proud of his possessions. Princes of the South standing atop their car dealership boats, holding giant ocean fish like scalps they had won in war. No, Tinder was out.

  It was hard to find anyone to sleep with actually. My sexual organs were shriveling up, crumbling like burnt kale as the electricity of the culture war heated up. The guy I had been sleeping with kept saying stupid stuff about politics not mattering: “You know, the World Bank is just orchestrating all of this.” And every guy I knew hated Hillary because she was so “unlikeable,” like they were auditioning to be part of a Pew Research poll. The lack of physical affection was making me sensitive. I flinched like an animal who has found itself in a cage with snakes. I longed for the comforting blue of Cleveland.

  Despite the looming election, it was still summer in a beach town, and we were all busy working three jobs, trying to harvest as much money from tourists as we could before they left us again. They were at least a welcome distraction from the news. They showed up with their kids and cousins, got blisters from walking around in flip-flops, complained about the drivers, and spent their savings accounts. The early summer tourists were all richies from up north who rented beach houses at the height of season. But as the summer dragged on, it shifted, to relative locals from Greensboro or Raleigh. The people who knew to wait till the hotel prices went down a little, and then they could afford a weekend at the beach before the kids headed back to school.

  One Saturday night I was giving a ghost tour downtown, a thing I did for extra cash. Summer nights in Wilmington are full of college kids, marines, and tourists. Dusk is sweet in the South. Everyone is a bit happier once the sun goes down because it’s no longer one hundred degrees. They like to have some patio beers and find touristy things to go on: carriage rides, boat tours, ghost tours.

  There was a large group for this tour even though it was the end of the summer: famil
ies, older folks, grandmothers visiting, couples from Jacksonville. It was the end of the night, I had walked them past most of the cool houses, and we were all having fun.

  On the corner of Dock and Front Street, right in the middle of the rowdiest stretch of college bars, I stood in front of a joint called the Husk, and told a story about a river captain and his brave dog—a good one for families and people who cried at ASPCA commercials. The dog dies, see. Everyone loves a ghost dog.

  As we stood there, me in black witchy garb gesturing towards the bar, this crowd of white people in polo shirts, flip-flops, and pastel shorts circled around me, a towering guy approached. He looked like the kind of Marine you see in movies or GI Joe commercials—huge arms, bald head, the tendons sticking out around his neck. There are a lot of Marines in Wilmington, they come down on the weekends, to go on dates or drive for Uber. In general, I like them. We don’t have a lot of Marines in Cleveland, and so my first exposure to them was here, drinking usually, and they are always polite and respectful in ways that the townie college boys are not.

  You can tell the Marines apart because there’s his particular smoothness to the way they move, always keeping their spines straight, in control of their muscles. Like ballerinas. This guy was very tan, with a tight pink shirt, and Jersey Shore jeans, and his ballerina was wasted. He walked drunkenly right into the middle of our group, then stopped abruptly, as though suddenly aware he was surrounded by people.

  “What is this?” he said, swaying.

  “It’s a ghost tour, “I said brightly.

  He stopped moving and looked more intensely, at the people, and then at me. Just staring us down. I smiled again, half laughing at his swaying, waiting for him to move on. Then, as if a lightbulb had gone off, he got it.

  “No you’re not. I know what you are, don’t try and lie to me. No, you’re a f--king feminazi Hillary supporter. You’re all f--king feminists. You can suck my f--king cock, bitch,” and he started vehemently miming the action of me sucking a cock, which was in fact just him pretending to suck a cock. But I wasn’t going to point that out.

  A middle-aged guy, his sunglasses perched on his slightly balding, burnt hairline, stepped forward. “Dude, this is a ghost tour. There are children and women here. You are ruining it for everyone.”

  The crowd murmured its support.

  “Shut the f--k up you weak libtard. This is my country.”

  “Leave my dad alone.” A prepubescent girl in Walmart punk clothes stepped forward and screamed. Her voice was shot into the air like a cannonball. We all waited for the splash. It didn’t come. Even the drunk guy looked startled.

  “If you don’t leave, I’m going to call the cops,” I said.

  He leaned in, yelled in my face. “Go ahead and f--king call the cops. I know what this is. I know what y’all are doing. I’ve got rights!”

  “Look, dude, I don’t know what you think this is.” Another older man moved up next to me. He was wearing a shirt that read “Jesus Saves”, and his wife was gathering their children in her arms and backing them away. The whole family was a cause-and-react swing: he stepped forward, they moved back. “This ain’t nothing political. She’s just telling stories.”

  “I’m not letting bitches like you destroy this country,” the drunk guy said, pointing at me, and I could feel people tense up, like he was going to hit me and they knew they were gonna have to do something.

  “OK guys, listen,” I said to the crowd, “we’re just going to leave. Ignore him.” I started walking the group across the street. He hollered expletives after us, but as soon as we were a block away, he stopped yelling and continued his wandering.

  We stopped to gather ourselves. A couple of the tourists came over and asked if I was OK. They surrounded me protectively like a group of clucking hens.

  I wasn’t really fine. I was shaken. I was furious. But I smiled professionally, said I was fine, agreed with them the guy must have been out of his mind. It reminded me of the time my boyfriend and I were mugged, how the real shock had taken time to wear off and then the fear had come days later, when it made no sense to be talking about it still. I could feel that shock coming and fought it off. No weakness in front of strangers.

  “Did you know that guy?”

  “How dare he talk to you that way, with kids around!”

  “What do you think he was on?” an elderly white lady asked. She had a little gold cross at her throat. I saw it, and remembered to not swear. Don’t crack some joke about cocaine.

  “I don’t know, but definitely something. What a jerk!” one of the other men said. “As if anything about us screams “political rally!” We’re just trying to have fun with our families, and assholes like that…”

  A supertan woman, her perm frizzing in the humidity, put her perfectly manicured hand on my shoulder. “You handled that very well, dear. If that was me, I would have lost it,” she said in a thick Jersey accent. “And I don’t think you look like a feminazi at all.”

  They all came back to the shop with me and wrote feedback forms for my boss about how wonderful I had been. “Handled it like a pro” someone wrote.

  Back home, I opened a bottle of wine and chain-smoked on my porch. It was 80 degrees and the trees were humming in the thick North Carolina darkness. The worst part was that he had been right. I was a Hillary-loving succubus feminazi. I did want to change his country. I hated men like him. Like a well-trained predator, he had smelled it on me or seen it in my face. Maybe he had just seen a pale fat girl, dressed in black, without a ring on her finger, and guessed. Nobody else had seen my difference though, or more likely they hadn’t cared, and I clung to that thought for comfort. That at least, in person, they had my back.

  INTRODUCTORY COMMUNICATION: TEACHING ACROSS MICHIGAN’S URBAN-RURAL DIVIDE

  LORI TUCKER-SULLIVAN

  Introductory Communication

  In the fall of 2016, I put a few thousand miles on my car working as an adjunct professor of public speaking. As an adjunct, I accept positions wherever I find them, and that semester was no different. I had three classes—one in a rural Michigan community college, and two in an urban four-year institution. My students varied in age, socio-economic status, and intent with regard to their educations. Though most kept quiet about their political leanings, they were usually easy to discern, whether from comments they made or the speech topics they chose. From week-to-week during that fall, I taught, counseled, and heard the stories of immigrants, refugees, unemployed housewives, a cancer patient, and others. (All names have been changed to protect students’ privacy.)

  September

  If I’m lucky and miss the grain haulers and school buses, I make it from home to class in just over an hour. The drive is always lovely this time of year with leaves turning and wheat casting a gold glow across the suburban acreage. I begin by pairing students up to introduce one another to fellow classmates. I hear repeatedly about their majors, former high schools, and how much they hate public speaking.

  Debra is older, perhaps thirty-five. I often have two or three students returning to school after being laid off, or after being told by their employer they must have a degree. Debra is a slight, perky redhead. A stay-at-home mom, she’s returning to school to major in environmental science. “I decided to do something with my life now that my kids don’t need me so much. If I’m going back to school, it should be for something important,” she says to the class. She remains after class to tell me she’s nervous.

  “My husband is pretty ambivalent about this,” she confides. “He owns a business and doesn’t think I should worry about a career or money. But it’s not about that, you know?” I do know. I tell her she’ll do fine. I’ll be flexible with her work if she gets overloaded; she can email if she needs to miss class with a sick child. We’ll make it work.

  Later, I meet Sean, a suntanned high school senior taking classes that will allow him to graduate with an Associate’s degree. These students are always motivated and eager and I enjoy t
hem. Sean fits that description, though he is quieter than most of the high schoolers I’ve taught. When he asks if we can talk, his face is serious.

  “My parents are divorcing and my mom just moved out,” he says. “She bought a house closer to work, so I may be late on days when I stay with her. I’ll try not to be. I just thought you should know; if I’m down, that’s why.”

  There are a few others who stand out that first week. Some I’ll come to know pretty well. Others will float just below the radar and skate out with slightly improved skills and understanding.

  The following week, I’m in a very different setting. Looking out at my urban class, I see young women in headscarves, young men with sagging pants, and a few students wearing expensive sneakers. They are kids figuring out schedules, navigating campus, and reuniting with friends. The classroom is filled with technology—whiteboards and giant screens from which I can project lecture slides.

  The students’ introductions are also different. Their majors are bigger—biochemistry, engineering, pre-med—this is career prep, not simply job planning. They are more confident. They talk about communities where they grew up, but also about international travel and community service. It’s clear their worlds are bigger than their peers’ at community college. But they are not without challenges.

  Carla is a quiet African-American woman with short-cropped hair. Adorned with tattoos bearing the names of those she’s lost to illness or violence, she projects a shy vulnerability. She refers to me as Miss Lori. I sign papers allowing her to join though the section is already full. I count seven times that she thanks me for the opportunity.

  The students are uncertain as they approach the front to speak, except for Billy. He stands at the whiteboard in full animation, waving his arms, rubbing his hand over his blond crew-cut, and shouting his introduction as though auditioning for a stand-up comedy act. I can’t tell if this is bravado masking fear, or if he is truly this outgoing. He tells of being teased about his clothing choices in high school. Pointing to the blue hoodie he’s wearing, he says he’s worn it every day for the past four years, the hood mostly up around his face.