Roxanne Gray Writing About Indiana

Another piece I meant to include in my week-in-review post, and then got second thoughts. What Roxanne Gray writes about Lafayette, Indiana deserves to be considered by Hoosiers.

Intentional, Home (The MIT Press Reader)

I ended up withdrawing from the lease on my beautiful new dream apartment and losing my deposit. Instead, I rented an apartment in Lafayette in a weird, creepy building with hallways that looked like they once hosted a series of horrifying unsolved murders. The apartments, though, were newly renovated, and it was a small town, so I had a three-bedroom, two-bath apartment with beautiful hardwood floors. My rent was a modest $1,400, and I consoled myself with the knowledge that a livable city was a mere hour away.

Living in Lafayette would be fine. It would be fine. Instead of driving an hour each way to work, I would have a breezy 10-minute commute across the river to West Lafayette. I would, as in the years prior, have large swaths of time to write. I would get to know my colleagues and maybe make some new friends. I would find my people and be more accessible to my students. I would be fine. It would be fine. It only took a few weeks to realize I had made a horrible mistake.

Lafayette was by no means the smallest town I’d ever lived in. It even had some of the creature comforts that make life a little easier without the liabilities of a big city — a multiplex, a Target, a few decent restaurants, a Starbucks with a drive-thru. But it was also Central Indiana, a place where people flew the Confederate flag without irony even though Indiana was never a part of the Confederacy. Because Indiana is an open-carry state, it was not out of the ordinary to see a man walking around in board shorts and a tank top, a gun holstered at his waist.

As time goes by, I have seen fewer people walking around Muncie strapped. I think I only saw three. One sticks out in my mind, he was in a local grocery store and seemed to be flaunting his holstered weapon. He struck me as one whose need to flaunt surpassed his dangerousness. I drew up a list of people who would have seriously injured him before he got his hand on his weapon. I do not think we are proud of being an open carry state, and I am certainly not proud of those who do openly carry their handguns. Such machismo displays such a lack of manliness.

I saw a Confederate flag flying in Whitely, a predominantly black area of Muncie. Then there was the fellow who flew an oversized Confederate flag and an equally large American flag. "Unironically" covers that moron quite efficiently. It is a sign of the movement of Southerners into the state; a thing that drove my mother's sister back East. I take it as a sign of our poor education system that this flag represents rebellion rather than - in the words of The Great Santini - losers. Then, too, my family has been in Indiana for over two centuries, had two relatives die in Andersonville prison camp, and a great-grandmother who was involved with the Versailles G.AR.. That same great-grandmother helped raise my mother and the aunt who could not take the southern influence in Indiana.

But Ms. Gray is correct that we take too much joy in our backwardness.

More news this week about Roxanne Gray, and her own website:

Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman to lead The Rumpus as magazine’s new owners 

Roxane Gay

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