A year ago, I moved to a Little Town in Maine. Like Puff, I'm dissertating which is really just a shorthand way of saying I go wherever someone will pay me to teach/research/write until I get my advisor's stamp of approval and I'm allowed to go find a "real" job (then I'll still have to go wherever someone will pay me to teach/research/write but I'll get better benefits and a bright-eyed research assistant I can unload five plus years of pent up exploitation on. What joy is mine).
My travels led me up to the northeast edge of the country, 3 parts New England and 1 part Canada, where the population of people of color is 2% at best and composed of Rwandan, Somali and Sudanese immigrants, military folk, college students (students not faculty, and with an emphasis on athletes) and a few ancien African-Americans descended from eighteenth-century black New England families or some combination of the above. To put that in better perspective, I know all five adult black women in town and all of us are affiliated with the university.
It starts getting dark at 3 p.m. here in the winter. The town (don't blink, you'll miss it) closes shop at 5 p.m. (the really rowdy ones close at 8). Driving slow is the norm and honking is rude (for a native Chicagoan, this damn near kills me). Walking is big, running is bigger, kayaking in the summer (and snowshowing in the winter) is biggest. Everyone has partners (this a meta term that pretty much signifies long-term sexual relations whether married or otherwise) and kids. And playdates. The public radio station plays classical music 80% of the day and there is no Tell Me More or hip hop & R&B station (utter fail as far as I'm concerned and really? All day? who wants to hear classical ALL day?). Waking up at the butt crack of dawn is not only commendable but expected and if you admit you don't expect to receive the New England Look of Disdain.
I think I kind of love it.
Which is weird. Because I'm pretty much the opposite of everything above. I mean--I'm urban. The hell am I doing on the other side of the world in a little town where I can't even find good leave-in conditioner?
But there is something refreshing and familiar--in a Northside Chicago sense--about the blue collar, laid back townspeople. I won't describe them here because I'd have to think and choose my words and this was supposed to be a quick morning post. I'll just say that I got here and I knew them. They were my Polish-Italian immigrant descended neighbors in Chicago's Lincoln Square, they are my mother's overworked and underpaid co-workers, hell, some of them are my mother with her stubborn and loving belief in equal opportunity. And I appreciate that they don't come laden with the same oppressive baggage that I found in, say, St. Louis or Atlanta or D.C. Oh, they have their own issues, and put some of these folks in those cities for a few years and I'll bet white privilege will have its way with them. But their issues aren't the same. Time, place and historical context has given them a willingness to engage you.
And a willingness to leave you alone to do your own thing since their sense of self doesn't revolve around oppressing you.
So to everyone who ever looked on my move to a small town in the Arctic circle with disbelief--yo, it's cool. Give it a try. Life is grand.
