Late at night on Valentine’s Day 2020, I missed a call from my mother because I’d shared a bottle of red wine with my husband, Mike, and we’d both fallen asleep on the couch. She was calling to tell me that authorities had found my father’s body in his apartment. No one knew how long he’d been dead or what had killed him. Sixteen years had passed since I’d last spoken to him, at my college graduation. Though I’d been the one to end our relationship, I couldn’t articulate precisely why.
When I woke after midnight and listened to my mother’s voicemail—she said only that it was important, and that she loved me—I could tell something was wrong. Hunched over my phone, I called back, but she didn’t answer. I jabbed at the screen to dial my older sister, who picked up immediately, like she’d been waiting.
“I’m so sorry, Tati.” Her use of my childhood nickname conjured a sense of safety that I’d outgrown, but I curled up in it anyway.
I rose to tell Mike, who’d moved into our bedroom and was fumbling in his dresser for pajamas. I’d rarely mentioned my father to him, so he wasn’t sure how to respond at first. As the news sank in, I twisted my face, hoping to cry, but nothing came. My father had been an alcoholic my whole life. My mother, who’d kept tabs on him in the two decades since their divorce, had warned me in recent years that he’d gotten worse. He’d lost his job at Hewlett-Packard, which he’d held since I was a child. He appeared frail and had developed a tremor. I’d listened, but I hadn’t wanted to face any of it.
The coroner eventually ruled that my father had been dead for two weeks. The cause of death was emphysema, a condition I hadn’t known he had. Mike and I flew from Chicago to the Bay Area, where I grew up, to attend the small memorial service. My father’s ashes were displayed in a rosewood urn carved with the image of a densely rooted tree, conveying how he had been felled but would live on through us. I found this beautiful but also hard to believe.
Five days after Mike and I returned to Chicago, our governor issued a stay-at-home order. The novel virus that we’d heard about in the news was tearing through the country, and by the end of the year more than 350,000 Americans would be dead from COVID-19. Black Americans at that time were more than twice as likely to die of COVID as whites. Yet I didn’t fear for myself as a Black woman. I worked for a public library that allowed me to do my job remotely at the same salary. Mike’s hours were cut, but we had savings to fall back on and federal unemployment checks. We were privileged.
The pandemic left me with an expanse of empty time in which to ruminate, and I spent some of it trying to remember my father. Gazing in the bathroom mirror, I hunted bleary-eyed for the face of the little girl who’d mimicked his morning routine by smearing her cheeks with shaving cream and swiping it away with one of his orange disposable razors, the safety cap still on. Standing in front of the refrigerator, I recalled the taste of salt crystals sprinkled on tart Granny Smith apple slices—one of his favorite snacks. At night I rested the side of my face on my pillow and pretended it was the supple folds of his brown leather bomber jacket.
Trying to remember only made me more bereft.
Until the pandemic, I’d loved our two-bedroom condo on the middle floor of a brick three-story built in 1915. It was intimate enough that I could call to Mike from any room, and he would hear me. The attached deck, just big enough for two lawn chairs and a row of potted plants, was all the outdoor space I needed. Until the pandemic. Now my days revolved around the two neighborhood walks Mike and I took for fresh air—first by ourselves, then with Blanche, an exuberant pit bull mix we adopted when summer came. I should’ve been grateful just to be alive, but by August I was already dreading winter, when our walks would turn brief and bitter and I’d feel trapped—a situation I’d spent my entire adulthood avoiding.
One evening I sprawled across Mike on the couch, scrolling on my laptop for a place we might escape to for our first anniversary. Blanche was curled up on the slipcovered armchair we’d designated for her, her batwing ears at rest and her eyelids fluttering between sleep and waking. Nearly a year earlier, surrounded by family and friends, Mike and I had gotten married in an old firehouse. I’d worn a vintage green dress, my favorite color, while Mike had worn a pink tux. We’d taken turns sliding down the fire pole and eaten dinner from a taco truck parked outside. I’d walked myself down the aisle. If I’d spared a thought for my father at all that day, it had been fleeting.
“I want to do something special to celebrate our anniversary,” I said now.
“Our anniversary will be special because we’ll be together,” Mike replied.
I sighed. “That’s not what I mean.”
When I was growing up, my parents did not have a healthy marriage. My father rewarded himself each night after work with a bottle of cheap beer in front of the TV in our darkened living room. I could taste the encroaching despair even then, before I could name it. On weekends he would sometimes go out in the evening by himself, and the next morning my mother would confide to me that he’d stayed out until 3 AM and come home incoherent and barely able to stand, the pocket of his brown leather jacket concealing a napkin with red lipstick on it. Later I’d cower in a corner while my mother hurled accusations at him, wailing from a wild, mysterious place inside her. Many times she threatened to leave him, but she never did. Then, in the spring of my ninth-grade year, my father told my mother he wanted a divorce. Despite all that had preceded it, his announcement felt sudden. Even now, I don’t know what finally made him see that their intolerable situation was, in fact, intolerable.
“OK, what should we do for our anniversary?” Mike asked. His tone suggested that he’d be down for anything.
I examined a map of Airbnb listings within a day’s drive of Chicago. One massive farmhouse in the middle of nowhere beckoned. It was available for the right weekend in September.
“Have you ever heard of the Driftless Area?” The internet called it a geographic wonder of the Midwest.
Mike arched his brows over his deep-set blue eyes. “No.”
“Me neither.”
It was no big deal for me not to have heard of the place. I’d moved to Chicago only seven years earlier and still felt like a visitor. Mike, on the other hand, had always lived in or around Chicago and even studied urban planning in grad school. He gave directions that made no sense to me, like “Meet me on the south side of the street.” His unfamiliarity with the Driftless Area cinched it. For our anniversary, we were going on an adventure.
Three weeks later we packed our bright-blue Kia Soul, put Blanche in the back seat, and drove four hours northwest to Cazenovia, a Wisconsin village of around three hundred people. The Driftless Area is the only region in the Upper Midwest that, for reasons not fully understood, evaded the relentless glacial creep of three separate ice ages—geological events that created the flat terrain characteristic of the Midwest. Spanning twenty-four thousand square miles, the Driftless Area is different. The land there is unfixed, with hills and bluffs that undulate around small lakes and streams.
Before the pandemic I would have balked at the idea of exploring the rural Midwest for fun. Black folks know bad things can happen to us in the middle of nowhere. But I’d just spent months confined to my home and getting pummeled by news of the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Elijah McClain, and a seemingly never-ending list of other unarmed Black people with their own names and stories, all killed by police. In defiance, I thought, Why should only white people get to enjoy nature? Still, as Mike drove us into the countryside, I noted with trepidation the numerous red “Trump 2020” signs we passed, staked on verdant lawns or draped along the sides of commercial buildings like open sores that refused to heal. I hated feeling that at any moment I might need Mike to use his whiteness to screen me from harm.
As a Black man navigating an unjust society, my father had developed his own methods for trying to protect his little girl. His figure was slight, but he projected toughness with that brown bomber jacket he wore, the Newport cigarettes he smoked, how he strutted. He refused to answer any questions about his feelings or his past or even, bewilderingly, what year he was born. Growing up, my greatest fear was that my father would decide I was one of the countless “morons” and “imbeciles” who surrounded him, which included everyone from his coworkers to the cashier who took our order at Burger King. My mother told me he’d dropped out of Pepperdine University, and, without a degree, he couldn’t get promoted at Hewlett-Packard.
My father’s disdain sometimes extended to members of our family but rarely to me. I twisted myself into someone he might pin his hopes on, adopting his goals as my own. I cringed anytime I had to present him with a report card that included a grade as low as an A-; his disappointment would be palpable as he told me to change it to an A+ next time. But eventually I grew weary of working so hard to gain his favor. When selecting a college, I chose to study English at Brown, an Ivy League school on the East Coast, partly to flee from him and partly in a vain effort to prove to both him and myself that I was worthy.
While Mike drove us through Wisconsin, Donald Trump was preparing for a campaign rally the next day in Nevada, another swing state. Thousands of his supporters would jeer along with him inside a manufacturing plant, packed shoulder to shoulder, nearly all unmasked. Trump would lie and say that COVID was no worse than the flu. He’d accuse Joe Biden of wanting to wage war on the police. He’d claim that his opponents were trying to steal the election from him, and the crowd would lap it up, united in whom they blamed for the swelling chasm between the rich and the white working class; for violent crime, real or imagined; for the pandemic. They’d continue to blame Black and brown people for our own deaths. They wanted to return to an America that had never existed.
Earlier that summer, a week or so after a brave Black teen named Darnella Frazier had used her cell phone to record a police officer kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds while onlookers begged the officer to let up, Trump had tweeted that his administration “has done more for the Black Community than any President since Abraham Lincoln.” The divide in our country seemed irreparable.
Though Trump’s supporters were mostly white, whenever I looked at clips of his rallies, I’d always spot the rare Black person in the crowd and flinch. Sometimes it would be a Black woman, and I’d wonder how she could hate herself so brazenly. I understood self-hate, but the quiet kind. This stranger was contorting herself to fit an identity that could exist only in opposition to her. We weren’t the same, she and I, but in her I saw the lengths to which I’d also gone to try to protect myself.
I was relieved when Mike and I reached our Airbnb with a few hours of daylight left. Stepping from our car in the faint sun, I inhaled the crisp air and asked the universe to let me forget everything bad in my life for just a few days. Mike and I appraised our refuge: two acres of land and a farmhouse that seemed older but was the exact same age as our condo back in Chicago. After decades of disrepair, it had been restored to something like its original charm and turned into a tourist accommodation by the current owner, whom we’d never meet face-to-face. Though the exterior was covered in beige vinyl siding, the roof boasted an extravagant series of three gables, and a wraparound porch invited us to soak in the view on every side. Inside, Mike and I admired all the reclaimed materials: aged tin, broad wooden planks, gray stones. But it was foremost the surrounding land that confirmed we’d made the right choice.
This was our first trip with Blanche, who had spent the early months of her life as a stray in Texas before ending up in a shelter outside of Chicago. Mike clipped a thirty-foot leash to her collar and loosely tethered her to our new porch. The farmhouse faced a sleepy, two-lane highway and, on the other side of it, a field bordered by dense green ridges. Skirting the other three sides of the farmhouse was a hayfield with pockets of flowers blooming yellow, orange, and pink. Behind the house, just past the field, stood a thick grove of oak trees.
Popping open bottles of lager, Mike and I sat on the porch in a pair of wicker chairs to watch Blanche romp in wild loops and arcs. It was the first time I’d seen her run almost free.
When I was a girl, my mother told me about my father’s first wife. Mom had heard the story not from him but from his relatives in the South: He and his first wife had gotten together young, barely out of their teens. She soon became pregnant with a son, but my father returned home one day and found her collapsed on the floor. A blood clot had killed both her and their unborn child. As a girl I viewed this as a cautionary tale about the ways life will fuck with you if you get too happy. As an adult I know that Black women in this country are nearly three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, a disparity that persists regardless of education or income level. The death of my father’s first wife and their unborn baby was a cruel twist of fate, yes, but also a manifestation of the plenitude of ways Black people can lose their lives in this country.
After my parents divorced, they shared an informal custody agreement: During the week, our mother kept my siblings and me, while our father hosted us on the weekends in his newly rented apartment—the same one where he would one day be found dead. At my father’s we ordered pizza from Papa John’s, rented movies from Blockbuster, and slept on bunk beds in the spare bedroom. Over time I spoke less and less during these visits, as I increasingly blamed my father for his alcoholism, for treating others with disdain, for trying to flatten me into a copy of him but better. Finally he asked if I was mad at him about something. Already counting the days until I could escape to college and remake myself, I mumbled no.
“Do you want to check out the silo tower?” I asked Mike.
The restored silo that rose in the middle of the field was the Airbnb’s crown jewel.
“Sure, let’s do it,” Mike said.
“What’s the purpose of a silo?” I asked as we stood up.
“Farmers used it to store grains.”
We untethered Blanche from the porch and strode across the field. Reaching the top of the tower meant climbing six flights of narrow, winding stairs. Blanche ventured up a few steps with us, then halted in fear. Tenderly Mike picked up her thirty-five-pound body like I’d shown him: with one arm over her bottom and the other under her front legs, so she could still defend herself or run away if she wanted.
At the top a circular room enveloped us. The only light was from a row of windows in its rusty blue walls. I gave Blanche a dried beef stick to occupy her while Mike and I gawked at the view. Cazenovia emerged from a landscape of hayfields and goldenrod flowers, abutted by hills and the strip of highway that had brought us here. The sight was wondrous enough to sting. It reminded me of the valleys of California I still saw in my dreams. More and more I missed my childhood home and those early years when life had felt infinite.
“Maybe we should move here,” Mike said. I could tell he was only half joking.
“To this silo? Sure.”
“We wouldn’t even have to talk to the neighbors.”
“I’ll consider it.”
We both laughed, infatuated with the thought of becoming permanent recluses.
I tried to imagine the silo before it had been repurposed, when it housed a mountain of grain from the land instead of two weary tourists. I’d read that this sort of rural nostalgia was one of the unifying ideals of Trump voters. Before we’d come here, I’d researched Cazenovia online and learned that it was first settled by white European Americans in the mid-1850s and named after a town in New York State that had similar hills and streams. A twenty-year-old travel article in the Chicago Reader was complimentary overall but still referred to Cazenovia as “not a glamorous town,” which had bustled for only a few decades in the early twentieth century. The silo and farmhouse had been built when the railroad was new, in Cazenovia’s short-lived heyday. But after a flood had wiped out a number of railroad bridges in the mid-1930s, the train had never returned.
Mike had grown up in a conservative rural town, and most of his family still lived in that area. His relatives tended to be more liberal than their neighbors, but there were differences between us. Some had told Mike they supported peaceful protesting, but not the rioting in Chicago and other cities, nor the looting that sometimes happened when groups of people marched through the city declaring that Black Lives Matter. It wasn’t like I supported rioting or looting either. That summer, I had shed silent tears the first time I’d ridden my bike down Milwaukee Avenue, one of Chicago’s busiest streets, past all the stores whose owners had preemptively boarded up their windows in case the protests turned violent. But I understood the protesters’ rage, because it was also mine. Sometimes, to make myself feel better, I fantasized about grabbing a baseball bat and ramming it through a window, any window, over and over and over again.
That’s not to say Mike’s family and I didn’t love each other, because we did. They had welcomed me with open arms, and I’d ensured they had no reason not to. I was kind. I made well-timed quips. I rarely complained in their presence. Mike even joked that they preferred me over him. The truth was his family loved the parts of myself I showed them.
For the rest of the weekend, Mike and I visited the silo tower at different times of day, to admire Cazenovia under varying light. I tried to reset my internal rhythm to the languidness of the countryside. The farmhouse had no internet. (A note on the kitchen table said the owner hoped to install a satellite dish the following spring.) My husband and I were used to being online for hours each day, scrolling through Instagram, checking our email, and consuming the endless stream of bad news. Without the internet, I felt disconnected from society. I wondered if the residents of this land the glaciers had overlooked felt the same.
Every day we explored the town with Blanche. The heart of Cazenovia snaked around a man-made, roughly fifty-acre lake. Mike drove us down Main Street, the village’s modest thoroughfare. Along with the post office, grocery store, and bank, we were surprised to count three bars. It seemed that drinking was the most popular local pastime by far.
“Do you want to park and see the lake up close?” I asked.
“Nah. Do you?”
“Not really.”
We drove on. Heading south brought us to an interminable spread of shopping centers and fast-food restaurants and auto-parts stores dotted with Trump signs. I thought about the city of Kenosha, Wisconsin, which was closer to Chicago than Cazenovia. Three weeks earlier Kenosha had made headlines when police there had shot Jacob Blake, a twenty-nine-year-old Black man, seven times in the back and left him paralyzed. Days later a white teen named Kyle Rittenhouse had shown up at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha with an assault rifle, claiming he wanted to protect businesses from protesters. He’d killed two men and wounded another. Trump had said it looked to him like Rittenhouse had acted in self-defense.
I reminded Mike of what I’d read before our trip about Richland County, where Cazenovia was located. I knew he hadn’t forgotten, but I needed to say it again: It was one of only nineteen counties in the country that had correctly predicted the outcome of every presidential election since 1980.
We preferred driving east, where there was more farmland and fewer people. From the passenger seat I took photos of sights that floored me, like the sun peeking out from heavy clouds above an abandoned barn nestled in the hills, its bare-wood siding fading to sage green and browning with decay. And, later, a pristine white church in a vast field under plump gray rain clouds.
I thought back to a night when I was a child and my parents were still together: My family had rented a movie about a wife and mother who died unexpectedly and went to heaven. The movie was unremarkable to me, but afterward, when we were getting ready for bed, I heard my father sitting in the pitch-black living room by himself, quietly weeping. Not knowing how to comfort him and too afraid to even try, I left him there.
I wondered now: When had my father realized he would die alone? He’d been found only after his neighbors had grown concerned because they no longer saw him chain-smoking on the patio in his robe. They alerted their landlord, who dragged his feet for days before finally contacting the authorities to request a wellness check. After our father’s body was found, my older sister and younger brother, both of whom still resided in California, ventured into his apartment for the first time in years to collect important documents and choose a few of his belongings to remember him by. I hoped to cradle his leather jacket one more time. I could still recall its smell when I closed my eyes, and it felt significant that Mike, too, loved leather; he owned a brown leather jacket passed down from his uncle and even sewed bags and notebooks from leather as a hobby.
But my sister and brother told me that our father, who’d always insisted on cleanliness, had given up. Hundreds of beer cans covered the carpet of his apartment, and everywhere were empty bottles of generic over-the-counter pain medication he’d been using to treat the emphysema that would kill him. The stench of death was everywhere, on everything. Almost nothing was salvageable. My sister said she was glad it was she who had witnessed this scene and not me; I wasn’t strong enough.
On the eve of our anniversary, Mike and I spent most of our time on the farmhouse porch and in the yard. I cajoled him into taking turns guessing the color of the next car that would pass by on the highway. We played cornhole and card games while Blanche ran as far and wide as her long leash would allow. For a while I sat alone under the shifting twilight sky. The front door to the farmhouse was open, and I could hear Mike rattling in the kitchen with Blanche by his side. It made my heart ache how much the three of us belonged together.
What if we really did move here? I’d fled the Bay Area and my father for the life I had now. Maybe I could escape once more and remake myself in the Driftless, a landscape that shouldn’t exist, where hills and valleys had miraculously survived. I pictured Mike, Blanche, and me at peace among the hayfields and goldenrod.
Then a pickup truck came down the highway, two giant flags billowing from a pole lodged in the corner of the truck bed. The top flag was royal blue and emblazoned with “TRUMP” in white block letters; below it was the unmistakable X-design of a Confederate flag. The America I couldn’t escape hovered on the breeze. My stomach lurched, and I reminded myself that whoever was in the truck couldn’t see me in the darkness, and also that Richland County had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. I wasn’t sure what that meant for me though. People frequently did things that made no sense and told lies about it, even to themselves.
The truck quickly drove out of sight, but my dream of moving to Cazenovia was over. There was no escape, nothing to do in this one life except move through it. Though I didn’t regret visiting, I knew I didn’t belong there.
Trump would lose in a few months, but the vision of America he’d resurrected would outlast the 2020 election. It was a vision that existed in opposition to me. Eventually, after Mike and I returned to Chicago, I’d look up the most recent census data for Cazenovia and be surprised to learn that ten out of the three hundred or so people who lived in the village identified as Black. I’d wish that we had laid eyes on each other.
I grew estranged from my father by slowly drifting away from him. We never had a fight. There was no point. He didn’t express interest in hearing my thoughts if they didn’t match his own. He believed I would stay in California after graduation, but when I insisted on going to Brown—the first time in my life that I put my foot down on something that mattered to me—he acquiesced. My tuition and housing were covered by grants, loans, and some money my father cobbled together. He also bought my books each semester. I never asked how he managed it, never wanted to know what he sacrificed for me. During my four years at college I rarely called him. If he called me, my answers to his questions were listless and brief. I tried to be amiable when he flew in for my graduation, but I recoiled inside when he hugged me hello and was relieved when he left. Hell-bent on saving myself, I saw only one path forward, and it demanded I not look back.
The next morning Mike and I exchanged anniversary gifts at the kitchen table. I handed him a bag containing a brown wool cardigan I’d ordered online; he hated shopping for clothes. His face lit up when he slipped it on.
I couldn’t confess to Mike, here on our one-year anniversary, that I could no longer think about our wedding day without shame. At the time I’d been glad I hadn’t invited my father, and I’d never wavered on that decision. Since his death, though, I’d agonized that I’d wounded him one final time, that he may have heard about our wedding through the family grapevine or perhaps come across a Facebook post featuring my beaming face. Even so, if given the opportunity to do it over again, what would I change? My father had tried to remake himself in me. Maybe he’d succeeded, and the two of us were part of the same densely rooted tree. I wished he’d been a different kind of person. I wished I was a different kind of person too.
I unwrapped the small package Mike gave me. Inside was a slim notebook he’d made, bound by two sheets of smooth brown leather. I brought the notebook to my nose and smelled the fragrant binding. On the pages within he’d written one thing that he loved about me each day for the month leading up to our anniversary. Some were sweet, like the shape of my shoulders. Some were funny, like the way I walked when I was in a hurry. Some I wasn’t sure were true, like my commitment to doing what was right. Others were too personal to repeat here. I was astounded. Since my father’s death, I’d believed I was unlovable. I’d hidden so much of myself to survive. Yet Mike had still found thirty things to love about me. We held each other, and I rested my face in the warmth of his neck. I wanted to tell him how much it meant to me, but the words wouldn’t come yet. I wanted to thank him for honoring the parts of me that refused to flatten, and for not fearing the remote, shifting parts of me that were still unknown.
