To sum up such a diverse region with a few adjectives, or a rags-to-riches story of exceptionalism with a message of individualism at its core, is both misleading and dangerous. This book offers another way of looking at the Rust Belt, another way to grasp its contours—through dozens of individual stories, finely told. These essays address segregated schools, rural childhoods, suburban ennui, lead poisoning, opiate addiction, and job loss. They reflect upon happy childhoods, successful community ventures, warm refuges for outsiders, and hidden oases of natural beauty. But mainly they are stories drawn from uniquely personal experiences: A girl has her bike stolen. A social worker in Pittsburgh makes calls on clients. A journalist from Buffalo moves away and misses home. A city manager stops fighting the urge to relocate and decides to make a life in Akron. An ecologist takes her students to a CVS parking lot. A father gives his daughter a bath in the lead-contaminated water of Flint, Michigan.
We’ve come to recognize the major trends, popular as topics in opinion pages and stump speeches, that have come to shape the narrative of the region: racial discrimination, poverty, job loss, climate change, neglect, depopulation. But there is power in simply bearing witness. To learn about individual lives and specific places. To appreciate the writers’ abilities to render experience. And to resist the urge to make of this place a static, incomplete cliché, a talking point, or a polling data set.
In lieu of a thesis or some prescription, these essays offer gorgeous turns of phrase, heartbreaking experiences, and raw emotion. There is an urgency to them. We have created not only income inequality but also narrative inequality in this nation: some stories are told over and over while others are passed over, muted. So the writers in this book seek you and say: This is me and I am here. But more, they say: Please pay attention. Please listen. Let us tell you our story. We can tell it ourselves.
The importance of paying attention is the tie that binds all the essays in this volume. It is also central to the mission of Belt Publishing—the press that initially published these pieces in Belt Magazine and in books on Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Flint, Akron, and Buffalo—to create a much-needed space for the deep, various, complex, sad, wonderful, and pressing stories of the Rust Belt. The essays included here showcase the thick, overlapping, and various layers of the region. Like the Rust Belt, they are as suffused by life as they are by loss, if not more so.
—Anne Trubek, founder and director of Belt Publishing
GROWING UP
JACQUELINE MARINO
A Girl’s Youngstown
I USED TO BE AFRAID of the mills, or what was left of them in the late 1970s. Although I grew up in Boardman, my family often went to visit my grandparents on the east side of Youngstown. As soon as we got to the Market Street Bridge, my sister and I would hit the floor of our mother’s white Oldsmobile, clasping our hands over our noses and mouths. We would hold our breath until our lungs burned, until the structures we passed turned from smokestacks to skyscrapers.
My mother, a nurse, said the pollution the mills belched into the air made people sick and turned their lungs black. We didn’t doubt her. All the old people we knew died of cancer. We weren’t going to let that happen to us, though. When we saw the mills, we just wouldn’t breathe.
Youngstown residents had been passing over the Market Street Bridge—most of them much more happily—since 1899. After being fought by farmers who didn’t want to develop the city and “big interests” who thought the bridge would hurt them, its opening was “the climax of one of the most romantic chapters in the history of Youngstown,” according to a 1914 article in The Sunday Vindicator. The number of homes on the south side increased from a few hundred in 1899 to several thousand fifteen years later. The number of schools more than doubled in that same time period, and the number of churches increased from two to ten. Toward the twentieth century’s end, however, many journeys from the south side to downtown began reluctantly in the suburbs, whose residents, like us, were drawn not for business or fun but family obligation.
My sister and I continued holding our breath over that bridge throughout the 1980s, long after the mills closed. To us, the air was toxic and always would be. Those ugly structures were like sirens warning us to get to the air raid shelter. Mom would drive fast. We’d be blue, but safe.
As we got older, not breathing as we crossed into downtown became a form of protest. Going to Grandma’s redbrick house on South Pearl Street seemed like a form of punishment. In the house, we did little besides play poker for pennies and watch network television. Outside, my grandpa’s garden took up most of the backyard, and we weren’t allowed to climb the cherry tree.
Our grandparents’ neighborhood was nothing like ours in Boardman. We rode our bikes everywhere, sometimes even crossing Route 224 on our own. We explored the woods with our neighborhood friends, playing hide-and-seek and climbing trees until someone was thirsty or bleeding. Our lives were full and free. Cancer, black lungs, stinky mills—none of that Youngstown would touch us. We wouldn’t let it.
I didn’t realize then that you don’t get to choose what parts of your hometown you get to claim any more
