My Three Dads: Patriarchy on the Great Plains PDF
Preview My Three Dads: Patriarchy on the Great Plains
MY THREE DADS My Three Dads PATRIARCHY ON THE GREAT PLAINS Jessa Crispin The UniversiTy of ChiCago Press Chicago and London The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2022 by Jessa Crispin All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2022 Printed in the United States of America 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 1 2 3 4 5 isBn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 82010- 1 (paper) isBn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 60070- 3 (e- book) Doi: https:// doi .org /10 .7208 /chicago /9780226600703 .001 .0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Crispin, Jessa, author. Title: My three dads : patriarchy on the Great Plains / Jessa Crispin. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCn 2021062384 | isBn 9780226820101 (paperback) | isBn 9780226600703 (ebook) Subjects: LCsh: Patriarchy—Middle West—History. | Women— Middle West—Social conditions. | Middle West—Social conditions. Classification: LCC hn79.a14 C75 2022 | DDC 306.0977—dc23/ eng/20220118 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021062384 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso Z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper). For my three husbands: Nico, Christopher, and Noor What is one to do with a Nazi father? Apparently the only solution is to reject him. If you speak of the need to inte- grate your identification with that father, you are immediately treated as a Nazi yourself. . . . In order to become a human being in the full sense of the term, we have to be able to discover, confront and own, the Hitler in uns, otherwise the repressed will return and the disavowed will come back in various guises. Janine Chasseguet- smirgel Memory operates as an unending sore. stephen Frosh It is both reasonable and realistic to act as if another world were possible. Kathi WeeKs [ 0 ] I am my father’s son he aPPeareD firsT as a PUDDLe. Liquid pushing up through the floorboards, rather than dripping down from above. I did not think much about it, just mopped it up with a towel and for- got about it until the puddle showed up in a new place. How could I say this was strange, the whole house was strange. The first living, human occupant of a house that had remained vacant and boarded up for fifteen years, I struggled to adjust to it and it struggled to adjust to me. The animals of the neighborhood still considered it theirs. They found their way into the house one way or another: squirrels, baby possums, mice, stray cats. They wandered in through grates, through holes in the floorboards, through the basement. I shooed them all out with a broom, through the back door, until the heat and the wet of the summer warped the cheaply installed wooden frame so much that the back door no longer opened or closed without a few shoves. Both the house and I felt permeable. There had been talk of a Kansas City economic revival, of a coming housing boom, and property started to be snatched up and rehabilitated, but the 1 promised residents did not come. All over America, the whites of the white flight were leaving suburbs to reoccupy cities, but the whites of the Kansas City suburbs stayed put. Houses in the city remained empty, lots remained vacant and weedy. On every block in my neighborhood, at least three houses stood with plywood nailed across their windows and doors. There were large gaps between the houses, with the lots standing empty and overtaken by dramatic weeds. Whoever had bought this house lived in another state. They soon realized the invest- ment was not going to pay off and halted the restoration pro- cess halfway through. There were new doors in old frames that still bore the marks of forced entry. The windows on the east side bore manufacturer stickers boasting of their energy effi- ciency, while those on the west side were so brittle and old that simply trying to open them would sometimes cause them to shatter. This house, a rental, was the manifestation of giving up hope. I refused to get the message. I had returned not to the state of my birth but to within spitting distance of it. I could tiptoe right up to the border and retreat back to the safety of my house, but the house offered no real safety. Not even from the elements. Rain, wind, snow, cold, humidity— they all snuck in with the insects and the wildlife, sure this was their house too. I was spending a lot of time putting up weather stripping, hanging plastic across drafty windows, trying to claim a space that did not want me. I was insisting I belonged there, despite all evi- dence to the contrary. So it did not help my sense of calm or belonging when the previous owner, long deceased, returned as a puddle, as knock- ing and whispering sounds in the kitchen, as wine glasses and towels and shoes moving around on their own, as a feeling ema- 2 nating from the stairs to the second floor, as a basement door that would swing open whenever it cared to. I shouted into my empty house, “If you’re here, you’re here, and I will try to deal with that, but if you ever show yourself to me, I will burn this fucking house down.” The dead seemed the majority demographic in the neigh- borhood. When I would explain to a Kansas City native where I lived, the response was usually, “Oh, the serial killer neighbor- hood.” And a late- night internet search would confirm that, yes, just a few blocks over, past where I walked to get to the only grocery store, a mile and a half away, a man abducted young, gay men, he poured drain cleaner into their eyes and throats, he shocked their bodies with electricity, he drugged and suffo- cated them. “You haven’t heard of him,” people told me, “because Dahmer happened around the same time, and Dahmer was prettier.” There is only room in the American imagination for one sadistic predator of young men at a time. The predators of young women, on the other hand . . . The house where the man killed so many men was razed, and I wonder if that unleashed their ghosts onto the neighborhood. To die in such agony, surely the energy of that rips outward for eternity. The former standard middle-c lass dream of a home, so normal looking, so white, in a respectable neighborhood, remains a gap between two other normal houses. If they too contain atrocities, they keep their secrets. I tried to coexist with my one particular ghost, who was sticking around despite probably not having met a violent end. I admitted to myself that he and I had got off on the wrong foot, and that was my fault. On my first night after the move, alone in the hundred- year- old house with nothing more than one air 3
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