Indiana Is My Home
This July will mark the beginning of my 20th year living in Indiana. I’ve had something of a love/hate relationship with it for most of those years.
After the dramatic landscape of North Carolina, where I lived before moving to marry Dyke, Indiana’s miles of flat fields, variously blanketed in corn, soybeans, or snow, seemed featureless and a bit boring. Only over time would I come to appreciate the quiet beauty of the Indiana landscape, with its wildflowers and mercifully spared patches of woodland. This has become love.
One day several months after moving to the state, when the temperature dipped to -16º, I wondered why the first people who lived here would think such a place habitable, rather than choosing to hightail it south. (The temperatures in winter have been pretty frigid at times since, but that -16º hasn’t happened again, as far as I know. And I would probably know.) While my blood remains thin, I’ve come to appreciate Indiana winters, as long as I don’t have to be outside for very long. I’ll never be a snowsuit/skiing/snowballing sort of person; I believe that sort of appreciation of cold weather has to be cultivated earlier than one’s forties. But again, love.
Indiana politics is where the hate comes in. The state is run by a supermajority of (in my opinion) retrogressive, repressive, oppressive far-right Republicans. The majority of residents—approximately 52%—lean right, away from inclusiveness, appreciation of diversity, separation of church from state, embrace of representative democracy, the right of those who disagree with them to be heard (and counted, and maybe even to influence public policy). Despite its strong vein of progressive resistance and activism, Indiana is not known for its center- (much less left-) leaning stances and policies. I hate the resentments and the backlash that inclusivity seems to generate in the state.
And so I was intrigued last Saturday when, on a leisurely drive with Dyke, we came across a double-sided historical marker at Falls Park in Pendleton:
In 1843, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society sent speakers to New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana to hold "One Hundred Conventions" on abolition. When speakers encountered citizens with deeply held racist ideas, they were often targets of violence. On September 16, a crowd gathered near here to listen to George Bradburn, William A. White and Frederick Douglass.
During Bradburn's speech, more than thirty men marched in, armed with stones and brickbats, and demanded that the speakers leave. In the assault that followed, White, Douglass, and others were injured. Local supporters defended them and carried them to safety. Douglass spoke the next day at nearby Friends meetinghouse without incident. Rioters went unpunished.
What so piqued my interest wasn’t that Bradburn, White, and Douglass “encountered citizens with deeply held racist ideas.” I wasn’t the least bit surprised that they were assaulted. Or that the rioters went unpunished. I would have expected nothing else. But what snagged me was that “Local supporters defended them and carried them to safety.” Douglass had been seriously injured in the attack and suffered permanent damage to one of his hands. And yet he and other abolitionists survived the violence because local residents stepped in to defend them. That I wouldn’t have expected.
As Dyke drove, I looked up accounts of the incident on my phone and read them out loud. It was quite a story. According to the Madison County Historical Society,
One eyewitness account states that Dr. M. G. Walker saved Douglass from death from an attacker swinging a heavy iron bar over the head of Douglass, who by now was down. The doctor threw his weight against the would-be assailant, hurling him away just as Neal Hardy and Edwin Fussel came to the aid of the fallen orator. . . . The excitement was still at fever pitch at nightfall. It had been threatened that Douglass would be taken and strung up to a tree. Anticipating the additional violence, Neal Hardy, Isaac Busby, Joel James, John Lewis, and others armed themselves with squirrel rifles and formed a line around the Hardy home.
When I looked up from my reading, we were approaching an old white clapboard building with two discrete sections of graveyard behind it. Dyke had brought us to the Fall Creek Meeting House, the same site where Douglass spoke the day following the melee, where a number of his companions worshiped. Gravestones bear names from the MCHS account—Hardy, Fussell—and the names of others who also surely came to Douglass’s aid. The Fall Creek Meeting House, it turns out, was one of a number of stops on Indiana’s segment of the Underground Railroad. It is, as Dyke mused, sacred ground.
This eye-opening Saturday jaunt changed my relationship to my adopted home state of Indiana. It isn’t populated only by Trump-loving, Fox News-mouthing theocrats and white supremacists, and a relative handful of idealists with pails trying to stem the tide. Progressive politics has a historical foothold in this state. It’s the home of activists who have been fighting good fights since at least 1843. The descendants of Hoosiers who put their lives on the line to defend the civil rights of others, long before the phrase civil rights was coined, live here. In fact, contemporary Quakers still meet every Sunday at Fall Creek Meeting House, which has a Facebook page.
I live here, in Indiana. And here is a place I can relate to, be proud of. Even though the state is notorious for narrow-mindedness and intolerance, Indiana soil is traversed by numerous veins of sacred ground that holds the bones of heroes.