The placement of this essay as first in the volume suggests that the cultural scenes to follow are enabled, staged, by a defining investment in white, if not (indeed, precisely because not) class privilege.
"Overcome" takes up the issue of working-class whiteness directly, but whiteness is the thematic basement that supports the foundation of class reflections. Jackson's visit stirs up resentment among Decatur whites, as they find themselves publicly constructed as symbols of small-town bigotry. "Overcome," the first in the collection, is about an incident in Decatur, Illinois, when Jesse Jackson came to town to publicly admonish the white school board for expelling six African American students for fighting at a high school football game. They begin in expansive but tightly bounded places and move outward to reflections on what it means to be alone together in America, where, as Bradway observes, "voices don't carry across the fields and farmlands to those outside." The book itself is stunningly designed, with chapters headed by black-and-white photos of local people-photos that insist that we see those who are the subjects of Bradway's essays as suspended in the past perfect tense, even as they appear to be in motion.Ĭlass is Bradway's explicit subject, whiteness implicit in all. Here indeed form follows function, as the generic unease of the essays bespeaks the social and psychic anxieties rendered by the essays themselves. These essays are not easily generic, combining elements of memoir, the personal essay, and creative nonfiction. The tensions here are between space and time, nostalgia for a formative past and the desire for transcendence, hope and disappointment, rootedness and displacement, evocation and provocation, grim despair and redemptive humor. Many of us regard our pasts with a mixture of nostalgia for a place of origin and relief at having finally escaped into reinvention, but Bradway dwells in these places of deep ambivalence. More specifically, the essays are set in churches and kitchens and yards and porches, places of gathering and reckoning.Ĭontradiction and ambivalence are the heart and soul of these essays. Mellencamp is from rural Indiana, the South of the North-and though Bradway's essays are set in rural Illinois, they sing the lived displacement in time and space that supplies the Mellencamp thematic. Mellencamp is the embodied voice of the rural working-class white: smart, tough, as uncompromising as he is malcontent, unabashedly loyal to a place most people consider no place at all.
If these essays have a common theme, it is about the working-class experience of the moment when the temporality and motion of life sink into permanence. Bradway's essays, like the song, are about time and thwarted desire, about becoming giving way to being, and more to the point, being in a place that, for better or worse, is home. The title of Becky Bradway's collection is a reference to folk hero and farm-boy rocker John Mellencamp's well-known lyric about the American working-class dream of mobility and the inevitable resignation to the confines of one's own tiny backyard.
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