Reconstruction 5.3 (Summer 2005)

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What Have Bagels Got to Do With Midwesternness? / Michael Kula

Abstract: “What Have Bagels Got to Do with Midwesternness?” is a creative nonfiction essay that examines the way my own “exile” from the Midwest has influenced my writing and my self-concept, and how, in turn, my writing has subsequently altered my perspective on the regional label “Midwestern.”  Drawing from sources ranging from Charles Baxter to James Baldwin to the 1970’s film, Breaking Away, the essay examines how it is not only the “place” itself that shapes us as writers, but perhaps more importantly, our own filtered view of that “place.”

<1> “Where are you from?”  It seems a simple question, really.  Like everyone else, I’ve been asked it thousands of times in get-to-know-you situations throughout my life, though it wasn’t until I returned from a recent trip to Europe that I realized the magnitude of what that question asks of us.  During my travels, whenever an Italian would ask me their equivalent—“Di dove sei?”—I would, without hesitation, respond with */Stati Uniti—two words that would elicit sometimes a smile, sometimes a cool stand-offishness, but always a thought-filled nod that indicated my answer gave them meaningful information about who I was, more significant than my mere national origin.  However, when I returned home, traveled to an out of state convention, and was asked the same question—in English, this time of course— I had no easy way to respond.   In that situation, one or two words have never been enough.  I did then, as I have for most of my life, respond with the same extended answer that makes my wife laugh and, quite often, makes the questioner tune out with a that-was-more-information-than-I-needed look.  You see, my answer ordinarily sounds something like this:  “Well, I was born in Chicago, but only lived there until I was two—at which point my parents moved our family to a small town in Southern Indiana.  But I only grew up there, and then went to college in Tennessee, and then grad school in Iowa, and then more grad school in Boston where I worked for a while until I moved to Florida where I now live and teach.” 

<2> Quite a mouthful, I agree, but despite the wealth of information in that well rehearsed speech, it never seems to satisfy the people on the other end of the question.  I suppose it’s because all they expect is a simple map-point location, a place they can register in the geography of their minds, from which they can infer things about me based on whatever that locus means to them.  And looking back now, I realize, that is precisely why in that intra-American context, I have never been able to give them a simple answer.  I am satisfied with saying Stati Uniti when in Italy, because I accept and agree with the identity those two words communicate about me.  No, I am not a flag-waving patriot, a gun totting cowboy, an overweight, automobile-fixated person who eats bland tasting bread with crusts no firmer than its spongy middle, or whatever stereotype they might have of us here across the ocean.  But in that international context, I am content to let them think whatever they want about me based on those two words, because I accept that I am in every way from the United States, for better or for worse.  It is my national origin, will continue to be so, and my view of what it means to be from the United States carries with it an idea of variability and openness that I don’t find limiting or confining or misleading about who I see myself as.  Those words for me imply a flexibility of personality that allows me to be many things along with an being an American at the same time, and when it comes down to it, I see the words as revealing little more about my identity than that simple idea of diversity, and although the Italians who question me might not understand me in this light, I know my answer, in my mind, faithfully describes who I am. 

<3> However in the smaller, American context I have had no equivalent to this, no brief answer like Stati Uniti that I have been ready or willing to accept as an appropriate label for my identity—at least not until recently.  Most people seem to think I should say I am from Chicago because that’s where I was born; others claim it should be Indiana, because that is where I have spent the greatest percentage of my life.  The truth is, I occasionally used to say I was from Chicago, but I stopped when I married my wife who is in fact from Chicago—born and raised there for all of her life— and I began to see how misleading it was for me to claim to be from a city that I never in fact remember living in.  The problem for me is the nature of the question itself, specifically the last word—from.  In that single word there is implied both a past and a present tense, an origin point perhaps departed, but to which you are at the same time still connected to by what you have carried away from it.  It seems silly to say, but you can not be from someplace if you were never there in the past, and likewise, you can not be from someplace if you are not in some fixed location in the present, even if those places happen to be the same.  Fromness is the very expression of that connection between present and past, an acknowledgement of the continuous thread that ties where you used to be with where you are now.  That complexity of time is why I’ve never had difficulty with more finite questions like, “Where were you born?” or “Where did you grow up?” or “Where do you live?”  All three of those are closed ideas, fixed in either past or present, and so when I have answered them I have never hesitated to give a one or two word answer.  They ask nothing about my ever-evolving identity or my self concept of who I am in an ongoing, continuous way, but of where I was then or where I am now. 

<4> So where am I from?  The answer I gave earlier is still in a way correct:  I am not from any of those places—not Chicago, not Indiana, not Tennessee, Boston, or Florida; but at the same time I am from all of them.  Who I am now is rooted in where I began and has been developed by where I have been since, and to ask my fromness is to ask my identity.  To answer their question with the name of a city or even a state has always seemed to me to be a denial of a part of who I am.

<5> Of course all of this sounds good, but in reality it helps very little when at the next party or conference, I am faced with an inquisitive questioner, perhaps only making idle conversation, who asks, “Where are you from?”  I could explain all of what I’ve said here, but I know well that’s not what he or she wants, even though it’s the answer the question deserves.  So I feel trapped, unable to find a middle ground acceptable to us both, and I am in a way happy, though at the same time dismayed, when I am spared this situation and, as it has on several occasions, the opposite phenomenon occurs.  More than a few times during my life I have been standing there, a condensation soaked drink in my hand, a crowd of new faces in a circle around me, and something about my background comes up—a reference to my family in Chicago or to my childhood in Indiana.  Only at that point, instead of having someone ask where I am from, one of the onlookers will immediately seize the floor and say in an eager, excited tone that makes me think he’s just solved some great mystery, “I knew you were from the Midwest.”

<6> I won’t say it, but I’ll think it: What does that mean?  In his confident assertion, the person is clearly claiming something beyond the obvious fact that either the city of my birth or the state of my childhood lies within that geographic zone commonly labeled The Midwest.  Even this however, is up for debate, since I am always confused where this so-called Midwest starts and stops: Ohio to Iowa?  Pennsylvania to Kansas?  Minnesota to Missouri?  I don’t know.  Are the Dakotas included, because they are, in my view of geography, in no way appropriately labeled as being in the Middle-West of the United States.  Neither, for that matter is Minnesota nor Michigan, yet those, I find, are always labeled Midwestern.  So I know at those moments when my party-mate anoints me with this title, he is claiming something else about me, something about my personality, my identity, my fromness.  For this person, being from the Midwest is a description that implies something more than pure geographic background—as I would agree, it should—but what does it mean and what is it about me that people find congruent with that label?

<7> In an essay in his book about writing fiction, Burning Down the House, Charles Baxter, a resident of Michigan and native of Minnesota, who I’ll refrain from labeling a Midwesterner because that is not something up to me, reflects on a moment when he is sitting in a church quietly attending a funeral.  “The stained glass is beautiful,” he says, “but in a stingy and pinched small-town Midwestern manner.  All the beauty in the Midwest, I think irritably, is on a budget.  A measured sampling of color in the stained glass was all the past generations in this city would tolerate” (30).  Here Baxter would seem to agree with my new found friend from the party: being from the Midwest speaks to something deeper than just having lived in that region.  In his eyes “a Midwestern manner” is a character trait that can describe beauty that is “stingy and pinched,” specifically that of small towns.  Now I have no idea what that stained glass might have looked like in reality, but in my mind’s eye I can see it because I know what Baxter means; I have seen that trait before, in both the land and the people of the Midwest, and I am left to wonder if those who so quickly state that my Midwestern fromness is obvious, see this in me?  If somehow I exhibit this trait of beauty on a budget? 

<8> I think back about my time growing up in Indiana and all the trips my family took throughout the region.  If you were to retrace our paths along the roads we drove—Interstate 80 from Cleveland to Des Moines, I-55 from St. Louis to Chicago, or I-70 from Indianapolis to Dayton—you would see what Baxter and I have seen.  The land itself is crafted in moderation.  I am certainly not the first person to point this out, but in the Midwest, there are no mountains, no valleys of note.  The region’s most dynamic features are its Great Lakes and mighty rivers, the Mississippi and the Ohio, but these too have a measured quality about them that, even as you stand and admire their scale and beauty, requires you to see them in context; for Chicagoans, Lake Michigan is the focal point of their city, though it is, in a way, a stand in ocean, a surrogate marine-coast line that can deceive you into overestimating in size, and when viewed in this light, in the scheme of the globe, it is only a middle-of-the-pack sized body of water, minor in comparison to the oceans and seas.  Likewise the Mississippi and the Ohio, the great waterways through the heartland, are in their essence and in Midwestern folklore just that—avenues of transit in the Huck Finn tradition that both begin and end outside the region.  Aside from those rivers and lakes, the most prominent features of the Midwestern landscape are the fields, vast tracks of manicured crops that evolve as the seasons change and have in themselves a Grant Wood quaintness as they stretch to the horizon.  But their beauty is different than that of the Rockies or the Grand Canyon or the sandy coasts of Florida and the rugged shores of New England.  Their beauty has been crafted by human hands; they have been created for a purpose and designed for a function, and any scenic satisfaction we get from viewing them is purely a by-product of this practicality, most likely best appreciated by those who have labored over them.

<9> When I used to think back about the people who populate this land, I always associated Midwestern with the more negative tone hinted at in Baxter’s “stingy and pinched,” rather than the second point he makes— the somewhat virtuous notion of being on a budget.  As a child in Southern Indiana I was always conscious of the way I didn’t fit in with those around me, a fact I am certain was more than simple adolescent angst about standing out in the crowd.  When I looked around at my peers, it was abundantly clear that the up-bringing in my house was different than theirs.  While I have said I never remember living in Chicago, the culture of that great city was still the dominant force in my house, as the cosmopolitan culture was transmitted to me through my parents and our frequent, sometimes monthly, trips back to visit relatives.  As a child when I came to school on Mondays, excited about having seen the latest exhibit at the Art Institute (a fact I now even find somewhat disturbing about myself), I had trouble talking to my friends who’d spent the weekend deer hunting, detasseling corn, or watching a demolition derby at the local dirt-track speedway.  At lunch when I tried to talk about buying Cannolli at the Sicilian bakery by my grandmother’s house, my friends talked about eating fried brain sandwiches and Burgoo, a stew-like concoction I’ve since learned can contain just about any ingredient on hand, though it is reportedly best with either squirrel or possum. 

<10> I can recall one day in particular, traumatic at the time, when our differences became perfectly clear to everyone around the lunch table.   As my friends pulled from their paper sacks, portion-sized bags of Cheetos or Fritos along with perfectly wrapped peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, cut diagonally from corner to corner of course, I, unknowing of what was about to happen, nonchalantly reached for my cream cheese smeared bagel, garlic or onion I’m certain, which we’d bought by the dozen during a last minute stop at the Jewish deli on our way out of Chicago the weekend before. 

<11> Now I’m imagining here, you must be wondering, what have bagels got to do with Midwesternness?  But strangely, in my mind, those seemingly innocuous rings of firm-doughy goodness, now nearly as universal as pizza, had everything to do with how I once viewed that word. 

“What’s that?” one of my friends asked.

“A bagel,” I said, thinking he had simply yet to identify what I was unwrapping.  The table sat silent for a few moments as I raised the sandwich in the air.  My friends’ eyes were puzzled.

“Looks like a donut,” someone said.  They all laughed.

<12> Although I can’t remember exactly what I said at the time—I’m sure I must have tried to explain it was bread like theirs simply boiled before it was baked— their response to my cornerless meal haunted me for sometime.

“Fag,” someone said, and again they all laughed.

<13> “Fag.”  I think about it now and I too laugh, but for different reasons.  At that time though,  for a sixth, seventh, eighth grade boy in the midst of puberty in small town Southern Indiana, there was nothing worse they could have said.  Certainly none of us knew what that word meant, even though we were well aware of the cruelty it implied, and so in that instant as one of my friends teased me, he unknowingly transformed that bagel from a simple meal to a point of embarrassed, self-doubt that stayed inside of me for the rest of my time in that city.  Like any child growing up, searching to define his identity, I wanted to fit in though still retain my individuality, and I was thrust into conflict between loving my bagel and hating my bagel, wanting to fit in and wanting to be myself, being faithful to the upbringing I received at home.  Underneath all of that, there was a hatred, a resentment, and a contempt building inside of me for the city of my childhood and the people from whom I felt ostracized for so long.  And so since that time, I have carried with me a certain negative view of that label, Midwestern.  Midwestern in my mind referred to the people I grew up with, who I saw as small-minded, provincial, and ignorant, though of course as a teenager I had none of the words to express this.  The word was a point of irritation, like Baxter’s “stingy and pinched,” and I spent the greater part of my life as a young adult trying to run away from that background and any thing to do with that dreaded label. 

<14> However, a funny thing happened as I arrived in Boston to begin my graduate education and subsequently my career as a writer.  I found myself in my creative works, my fiction and plays, returning to that landscape and those people I had spent so much time loathing.  My stories were then and are to this day most often set in Southern Indiana, with characters identical to the ones from whom I felt exiled.  In my stories, there were people deer hunting and flea market shopping.  There were parking ticket agents and mechanics and young men yearning for a simple job landscaping the at the Dairy Queen.  At first I dismissed this fixation as an example of that clichéd dictum that we “write what we know.”  But the longer I thought about it, I realized, this was not what I thought I knew.  Certainly I knew the landscape and the environment, but how could I have known the inner lives of these characters whose identities had dumbfounded me for so many years of my childhood?  I couldn’t have known them, I thought; in fact, for so long I didn’t want to know them; I wanted to be rid of them, free to be who I was, away in some other city in some distant region, eating my bagels proudly without scorn.  

<15> It’s certainly no coincidence that my friend used the word fag for me that day. It wasn’t dork or nerd or sissy or whatever derogatory term was in vogue at the time.  It was fag, a word he didn’t understand, used as a slur for people he didn’t understand.  While it is no doubt as significant a difference, just as my friend lacked exposure to homosexuality, he also lacked that experience with me, my simple bagel, and my big-city family life.  His natural reaction was to push me away: that which he didn’t understand had to have been bad, and it was safer to keep it at arm’s length.  Strangely the longer I thought about that, the more I realized I too had been guilty of this same error.  In my fleeing from my background and my reluctance to accept where I was from, I was in many ways just as ignorant as he was.  Fag was to him, as Midwesterner was to me. 

<16> I see much of myself in Dave Stoller, the lead character in the 1979 film, Breaking Away, about Indiana University’s Little Five-Hundred bicycle race, the mystique of which is second only to basketball in Indiana folklore.  Through his bicycling, Stoller is metaphorically trying to distance himself from his past, while at the same time he creates a new, exotic persona for himself as an Italian cycling champion, in every way oppositional to who we was— an average kid from a working class family trying to come to terms with his identity in the confusing class divisions of the college town.  My writing has been for me what the character’s cycling was for him, a means to break away, but also in the end, a way for me to return to my roots with a newly gained perspective.  In the movie, Stoller only finds genuine contentment by acknowledging his “townie” past and accepting that he is not from Italy, but from Bloomington, and similarly as I look back on my own writing through this lens, I see that the differences I had sensed between myself and my classmates had nothing to do with Midwesternness.  Mine were the differences that Stoller felt, between urban and rural, white and blue collar, divisions which certainly occur more universally than in just the Midwest.

<17> I now see that my much of my fiction comes from both a perplexity and a familiarity with the world of my childhood, but not however, in the way I had expected.  My characters are still in many ways foreign to me; they are almost exclusively small-town folk, with virtues and values different than mine, and I write about them, I believe, as a means to understand them, to reach out across our differences.  I can not go back in time and talk with my friend who mocked me for my bagel, but I can try, in the present, to erase the ignorance to which I have clung for so long, and the longer I write about these characters, the more I see that I do in fact understand them perfectly— perhaps not in every way, but certainly in their Midwesternness.  This word, I now realize is not a label from which to flee like Dave Stoller pedaling away from his life, but to which I must return because it is who I am.  Being from the Midwest does mean more than just being from a certain geographic region.  Being from the Midwest means to be a part of that landscape and that world of moderated beauty, founded at its core on practicality and function, and to adhere to that same budget of character in your own identity.  My characters and I share a similar esteem for the middle-ground, between indulgence and obligation, and any extremes of the spectrum.  We are like the past generations in Baxter’s church, able to accept only a “measured sampling of color” in our lives.  This, I see now, is neither good nor bad; it is simply who we are, and though some may view it as I once might have, as a limitation, a mediocre averageness that is bland and stunting, I am confident those people are not from the Midwest—or perhaps, they have not yet either recognized or accepted that they are.  For me, I now understand, being from the Midwest is something you are no matter where you are in the present or where you might go in the future; it is your fromness, and you carry it forward with you whether at the opera or the county fair, the museum or the basketball game.  It transcends location, because—similar to the way I have never hesitated to claim I am from the United States in an international context—being from the Midwest allows you to be many things at once. 

<18> I find this realization a startling discovery that will never leave me.  It is true, I now recognize, that, as James Baldwin writes, “Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born somewhere.  He may leave the group that produced him… but nothing will efface his origins, the marks of which he carries with him everywhere” (107).  Although, I did not always know it, I live Baldwin’s words.  Whether here in Florida or in some other state in the future, I will always be from the Midwest, and I have found in this realization not only a contented understanding of who I am, but also a new perspective to bring to my writing, for as Baldwin says, “On this acceptance, literally, the life of a writer depends” (107).  And if nothing else, I have found a simple answer to that dreaded question, and on the next occasion when someone looks across a punch bowl or a plate of cheese and asks, “Where are you from?” I can now respond with a single word and know that it is true.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James.  “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American.”  Encounters. Eds. Pat Hoy and Robert DiYanni.  Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2000.

Baxter, Charles.  Burning Down The House.  Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 1997.

Breaking Away.  Dir. Peter Yates.  Perf.  Dennis Christopher, Dennis Quaid, and Daniel Stern.  20th Century Fox, 1979.

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