AIM Online

What most surprised me, on reflection, about Indiana was less that it was a painful part of my life; it was realizing that it’s become an intrinsic part of my life.

Indiana was always a joke to me.

Illinois but with more cornfields and insanely racist, backwards people. A state still amazed by the power of a light bulb and wowed whenever an airplane flew over. The place where my dad’s parents lived and we reached by driving over a large quarry. I…wasn’t wrong about the first part, since Illinois is the soy capital of the country but the apathy writhing within that sentiment is my point here. It killed any desire to understand the people I was about to spend most of my college years around. The people who’d vote in Donald Trump twice and reshape our world.


The first weekend of my freshman year, my first weekend in Indiana without my family, I shot a gun. And another. And then a few more after that. Some of the professors took us to a field, asked zero questions, handed us an array of weapons, and pointed down range at a target with a cheeky grin inviting us to pull the trigger. My heart rattled within the cage it beat so fervently in as the AR-15’s recoil sent the block of metal into my shoulder. Later, orange discs would sail across sandy copper fields with a pointedly abrupt end to their brief journeys a few seconds after they began. Nobody there had asked what I thought of guns, being from Chicago. Their opinions on that part of me would come later, for now my being a good shot sufficed.

Two years later, I would spend a whole summer rolling across northern Indiana as a registered pest control technician, a time-limited guest in the vacation homes of Chicago petit Bougies. Still today I’ll have moments where snippets of this summer drift across my mind, brought up by a scent or a sound and sometimes even just an experience. Freedom Ranch pays me a visit every now and again, it’s sprawling driveway weaving across my memory until I reach the main house with its impatiently waiting host. He would be the one to grant me an armed escort across the premises and all along the interiors of his ranch house, ensuring that the fulfillment of my duties was accomplished without outside interference or self-wrought negligence. An off-leash dog may bring me back to the delightful experience of learning how to crawl into a driver’s seat from the roof of a truck. The sly, uneasy grin of a man not quite certain who or what I am invites a crowd-favorite: a diminutive, frightened Chihuahua comforted by its darling owner with the re-assurance that the tall, weary man at the door wasn’t a terrorist, even if he did look like one.

On my way to and from these odysseys in racism, I’d sail through the rolling fields and between the swaying branches of wind-breaks. Sunlight would cast it’s first rays and parting gifts across a painter’s delight of a broad sky. Vibrant field-ripened orange nestled in against plush violets and lounging navy with the occasional dab of rosé. Accompanying twilight’s arrival each evening, bands of fireflies roamed in lazy visual sonnets. Skies speckled with tufts of lines of clouds strung along the deep blue tapestry set the backdrop to gorgeous lakeside vistas.

These beautiful sights lingered as wounds became scabs; I learned from them both and called on them both.

Self-reflection of being biracial in Indiana from 2014-2018 necessarily brought me to realize that those others who were misunderstood around me sometimes didn’t look like me. Often times, I was treated as lesser by someone furiously scrambling to keep a mask sat on their face so as to not tip off the others. I wish I had understood that better then, but again apathy was the death of my curiosity.

It wasn’t that I didn’t try to understand the people around me when I lived there nor that there didn’t exist good reasons for me to write many of those people off. It was that I entered without a thought to understand, despite doing so when going to Costa Rica and France for study abroad during that same time. At that time, my interest in welcoming the estranged to myself lay only with the foreigner by land and not also by heart.

This isn’t naivete about the type of shit many people get up to in Indiana, where hundreds of Hoosiers proudly called themselves members of the KKK and Mike Pence got his kicks. My alma mater not only has me blacklisted despite giving me a full ride as their presidential scholar and student chaplain, I’d just as surely be lynched for daring to go back as a brown (socialist) trans woman should I ever decide to make a surprise alumni showing at homecoming.

I’ve come to realize I have a loving fondness for Indiana because it’s a place worn rough by loss and mired in the uncertainty of how to move forward within that grief. Like the South, (some of) it’s residents want to build a different future that (generally) breaks with the past where it hinders them and refashions it where they find beauty yet still. I wish that I had seen that earlier, that my conversations with others and relations with them had sought out that contradiction in action.

I believe that’s why three years ago in a coffee shop, I began to write what would be formed into my novella-turning-novel Where the Wind Whistles. A story exploring those contradictions through a majority Queer city in north Indiana during a warring state period in the tattered remnants of the United States, grounded through the story of a community of people wrestling with the grief of loss. From the start, the setting and the characters grew out of northern Indiana.