Decaying Tupelos: The American Deification of Violence
by Kimberly J. Soenen | November 6, 2024
(Night cycling in Chicago, 2020.)
A knock at my dorm room door.
I open it.
He’s standing there, again.
“Give me a minute,” I say.
He paces in the common area while waiting for me. Everyone on my floor is asleep.
It’s 2:30am.
I lift my bike over my shoulder and carry it out the door. We wait together by the elevator where his bike is already leaning up against the wall. We roll our bikes into the lift and prep our jackets and bikes in silence.
It’s early November in Chicago. The night is not yet biting, but just warning us of the impending Chicago winter. It is windy and there’s a light rain misting off of Lake Michigan. We can hear the lake talking.
The rhythmic waves sound like a heartbeat heard through an ultrasound.
We carry our bikes over our shoulders down the outdoor stairs of our dorm and drop our bikes on Sheridan Road. We strap on our helmets in silence. He takes off first. I follow, as ever.
My friend was a Resident Assistant at Loyola University Chicago. He was born and raised in Detroit. Because the skin tone of my friend was not the color of their skin, the young men on his floor would frequently vandalize his door and write violent words across it in an effort to intimidate him and make him feel fearful. Every time this happened, my friend would carry his bike down to my floor, knock, and we’d ride together.
And we rode together a lot.
He is tall and very athletic. Graceful in body and spirit. His speed is very steady and measured despite his anger and sadness. I keep pace. We pedal in silence.
Breath, chain, traffic, waves, pedal. Breath, chain, waves.
We pedal past the dire, dilapidated senior citizen Long Term Care Facility buildings that lined Sheridan Road in Rogers Park. We pass through the clouds of cigarette smoke from inebriated shift workers laughing in front of The Oasis bar with Pabst Talls in hand. We pedal past unhoused and addicted people sleeping in Loyola Park so near to the road we swerve around their personal belongings. We pedal over West Morse, Lunt and Estes past gang members hanging on the streets up to the border of Howard and give them a familiar friendly nod. They knew us well.
We curve north up Sheridan Road through Evanston where the smell of the mist changes from oil and carbon monoxide to flowerless dogwoods, decomposing oaks, decaying tupelos and tough ironwoods. We ride through the shine and sparkle of the Northwestern University campus and past the majestic architecture and gardens of the Baháʼí temple. We pedal along the manicured yards and gated driveways of Wilmette, Kenilworth and Winnetka and beyond.
There was never an agreed upon destination. I knew he had to pedal until he was exhausted, so I’d just follow. A helpless shadow. A witness.
We just kept pedaling.
The only sounds are our bike derailleurs, periodic traffic, and the waves. Breath, chain, waves. Breath, chain, waves.
On occasion, he’d stop—we’d stop— and he’d scream into Lake Michigan.
When we made it back to school, the sun would sometimes be rising over the Madonna Della Strada Chapel on campus. Churches are billed as a space for eucharistic adoration and religious sacraments intended to help humanity to evolve. The church is about sanctity, I’ve been told. It honors inviolability, I’m told.
But now, the church is the tech, banking and energy fiefdom of Palo Alto, Texas, Zurich, Davos, Aspen and Spring Valley. Discourse, debate and governing decisions are no longer stewarded in VFW halls or in school gymnasiums, they are made by clubs of men floating off the coast of Antibes in mega yachts. The thrones of these slovenly kings are now being blindly and willfully shouldered by the very paupers and jesters the kings are exploiting and preying upon. “The other! The other! The other! Them! Not Us!” the kings shout over the rails of their yachts while blood from hospitals, schools, health clinics and war torn countries the world over bleed into the waters.
This aspirational democracy—this bloody United States of America experiment—rooted in genocide, slave labor, discrimination, the perversion of religion and individualist self interest at any cost, has not worked out so well for the “many” in the myth of E Pluribus Unum. Whether it is celebrating, exporting, endorsing or engaging in structural, corporate or overt street violence, we are now beyond redemption.
My friend and I would hug in silence in the elevator corridor before saying goodnight after our long rides. Our bikes allowed us to fly, or at least flee, rather than fight. Sternum-to-sternum, we’d hold each other up, our young bodies drenched by rain or snow. How and when should we fight? our embrace asked. Just kids, our faces, hands and skin were already splattered with the mud lines of structural violence from this violent, violent, violent country.
Warrior paint, it looked like.
As we parted ways, there were tears in both of our eyes on most nights.
I carry my bike over my shoulder and look back at him silently before walking through my door.
“We’ll keep pedaling,” my eyes say. “I love you.”
You see, night after night after night, my friend had to go back to his vandalized door, clean it up alone, and walk through it again and again and again and again and again…
Additional Reading
Wave of Racist Texts After Election Prompts FBI’s Scrutiny by Tim Bal, and Erica L. Green for The New York Times - November 7, 2024