1842
On a Midwestern tour to drum up support for a second presidential run, Martin Van Buren had the bad fortune of passing through Plainfield, Indiana. A year and a half before, Van Buren had been swept out of office. The Panic of 1837, the worst economic depression in the country’s short history, had so frightened and upset voters that they’d elected the sixty-eight-year-old war hero William Henry Harrison, sending Van Buren out into the wilderness, political and otherwise.
The people of Plainfield had a local beef with Van Buren. Tucked away in in what was not so long ago the far-flung Northwest Territory, perhaps the townspeople of Plainfield felt small and forgotten in the face of such an existential crisis, at such a remove from the seat of national power that they began to question whether or not their lives were of consequence to those in Washington, D.C. It’s a feeling that still permeates much of the Midwest.
Perhaps more than ever they felt powerless, their suffering lost in the shadow of an indifferent government. However they felt, the people of Plainfield saw in the former president’s passage through town an opportunity to register, if only on a small scale, their dissatisfaction.
The National Road
Van Buren was set to pass through Plainfield on the National Road. Such a name, however, overstated both the grandeur and utility of what was at the time something closer to an ill-kept dirt path. Opened in 1818, just two years after Indiana joined the union and further expanded the nation’s western boundary, the National Road was the first highway built with federal funds. It strung together Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, and Indiana before terminating in Illinois. The National Road served as an economic and cultural lifeline to small towns dotting the country’s “frontier,” drawing together disparate places from the monied eastern seaboard to the nation’s rough interior. As the country grew, the National Road shrank the distance between those different ways of life.
But then markets crashed and banks closed. The national economy in shambles, Van Buren refused to fund improvements for the National Road, and by 1842, neglect had turned what had once been a country’s great project to connect its citizens into a collection of wheel ruts and tree stumps and humpbacked roots sticking through mud. Now, passangers’ teeth rattled when their carriages kicked and bucked through backwater Midwestern towns like Plainfield. The Road, these towns’ link to the larger world, was now better suited for hogs.
The people of Plainfield felt spurned, alone. Did no one back east care if their town lived or died? What was government for if not to protect them in these frightening times?
1997
It’s after midnight and I am eighteen years old when I see the blue and red lights of a Plainfield Police cruiser in my rearview. We both pull over, and our cars idle on the side of a county road not quite a mile from Highway 40, my town’s four-lane main street that began as the National Road.
In my small town, nothing good happens after midnight, but tonight I am this maxim’s slim exception. I’m on my way home, to bed, after laying on the carpet of a friend’s house watching Monty Python’s Life of Brian, as innocent and sober as I’ll ever be. At my window, the officer asks where I’m coming from, where I’m going. He shines his flashlight in my eyes, then jumps the beam into the backseat. It’s filled with dirty t-shirts, empty Powerade bottles, and a loose basketball that rolls the width of the car with every turn, as aimless and constrained as I feel on my near-constant drives around town.
“Give me that.”
My eyes follow the beam to its pool of light, and I pass my black matte Case Logic CD book through the window. Holding it open in one hand, flashlight in the other, the officer slowly flips through the 50 or so CDs. His face folds into a sneer. “Why are you listening to this n— shit?” he asks, then frisbees the book back into my car, sends me on my way.
The bottom of the hill
As Van Buren’s carriage tips down the lone hill in my otherwise flat town, the people of Plainfield line the road in their church clothes, waiting.
Rattling hard over what passes for road, the carriage picks up speed. The driver pushes the horses, and Van Buren begins bouncing wildly on his cushioned bench in the back, dressed in his fine clothes and boots, faster and faster still.
Waiting at the bottom, in front of the Quaker church, is an old elm, stout as fact. At its base, where the road conceivably goes, sits a mud hole, a prized spot for the town’s wallowing pigs. Rather than going around, the driver steers toward the elm, sending the carriage and its former president over roots, through the muck.
This is their plan. Let Van Buren’s own neglect upend him, cover the dandy New Yorker in Midwestern mud. The wheels hit the roots and jump like startled cats. The carriage starts to tip to the side, but slowly, slowly . . . stretching out the moment of satisfaction for the crowd, second upon second. The carriage lands on its side in the muck that everyone knows should be a road but isn’t. The driver, paid by Plainfield residents with a $5 silk hat for his part in this nearly pointless conspiracy, has ample time to jump from the carriage, clear of the mess.
Celebration of service
In 2018, the local newspaper runs a story headlined, “Donation from inmates gives boost to Plainfield public safety monument.” The inmates are serving time in the Plainfield Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison that sits a half a mile south of Highway 40, the same prison where my father spent more than twenty years as an educator. According to the newspaper, these inmates had donated more than $3,000 for the Celebration of Service Plaza, a monument to celebrate firefighters, 911 operators, and police officers.
“It says a lot for those who were actually arrested by those public safety officers to want to stand up and commemorate them,” my father is quoted as saying. “That also shows what kind of community we live in.”
The story quotes my father because the idea for the Celebration of Service Plaza is his. He conceived it, lobbied the town council for approval, and is now raising $10,000 for its construction. It is a celebration of government by private citizens, some of whom, the headline would have you believe, have but the slimmest of reasons to join such a celebration.
The story’s feel-good angle, however, falls apart after the first few paragraphs. The donations, says the prison’s recreation coordinator, are actually profits from selling inmates outside food they’d otherwise be denied—Pizza Hut, Arby’s roast beef sandwiches. The incarcerated men’s $3,000 is a donation only in the loosest sense. Inmates were aware the money was going to the monument, says the paper, though the prison’s recreation coordinator “acknowledged that many of the inmates wanted the comfort food and didn’t really care where the profits went.”
It’s a neat linguistic trick. The “donations” of the headline become “profits” in the paragraphs below, the story’s all-is-well smile distracting you from its busy hands. Inmates donating money to celebrate public safety officers tells one story. Seven paragraphs deep, the story morphs into another version, one closer to the truth: a community building a monument partly from the profits of the incarcerated.
Given the rhetorical shell game, my father’s quote about community begs a question: What kind of community is this?
Monument
“Van Buren climbed out the upward-facing side of the coach and waded through the mud to Fisher’s Tavern at what is now 106 E. Main Street. The road was lined with people from the surrounding county who had hoped to see Van Buren pass through. Mrs.Fisher helped clean the mud off of Van Buren’s pearl-gray trousers, frock coat, and wide-brimmed hat. This incident was long remembered as a moment when the people of Plainfield had made their point to the ex-president.”
— National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, U.S. Department of the
Interior
So pleased were the people of Plainfield with the execution of their plan to dump an ex-president in the muck that the carriage-upending tree became known as the Van Buren Elm. For years, residents and visitors cut pieces from its trunk as souvenirs. After a tornado destroyed what was left of the Elm decades later, the Daughters of the American Revolution erected a plaque commemorating the site of the people’s protest.
But once Van Buren’s carriage had been righted that day, once the ex-president’s pearl-gray trousers and wide-brimmed hat were wiped clean and he continued on his way, once the whole affair ended with their point made, did the people of Plainfield wonder about the purpose of their protest?
There was no remedy Van Buren could offer. He’d long since lost the power of his office. What, then, was their point? Simple cruelty? Reciprocity? To lower the New Yorker, this outsider, into their muck, to lower him to their self-perceived level?
If such a story was long remembered, what was its moral?
990
“I saw the repeated stories on the national news about policemen getting shot,” my father tells the newspaper in the spring of 2018, “so I approached one of the Town Council members and suggested we should not be waiting until someone gets killed before we recognize our policemen and firefighters.”
The same spring and summer that my father raises money for the Celebration of Service Plaza, hundreds of citizens take over Sacramento City Hall. They are protesting the murder of Stephon Clark, a Black man killed by the police. Two officers shot Clark while he was standing in his grandmother’s backyard, armed with nothing more than a cellphone. Clark had, according to his brother, grew up in “underprivileged homes” and was living with his grandmother in what The Los Angeles Times described as a “tough neighborhood.” A police helicopter spotted Clark after someone reported a man breaking into nearby cars. Though the story does not say it, the reader is meant to understand that people living in “underprivileged homes” in “tough neighborhoods” live with a certain kind of uninvited police presence and surveillance, one that is woven into daily existence, one that is of a kind with the officers who, while responding to a report of a string of possible burglaries, chased Clark into his grandmother’s backyard and fired twenty rounds at him, hitting Clark eight times, with six of the rounds striking Clark in his back.
Clark was one of 990 people police killed in the United States that year. In the same year, according to FBI statistics, 106 law enforcement officers died in line-of-duty incidents. Fifty-one died in accidents. Fifty-five were killed, as the FBI put it, “feloniously.”
Four years earlier, when Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, thousands of citizens filled the streets of Ferguson, Mo. People around the world watched live-streamed cell phone videos of police tear gassing protesting citizens, shooting them with baton rounds. The internet had closed the gap between uprisings like the one in Ferguson and those of us who still believed that the role of the government was to protect us in these frightening times.
That summer, 2018, each time I call home my father gives me fundraising updates. I do not ask for them. I don’t say, The timing of this monument feels wrong. I don’t say, The idea of this monument feels wrong. I don’t ask, What service are we celebrating? At best, I tell myself, the monument is tone deaf. At best, I tell myself. I don’t go beyond at best.
Why? Because I want to believe the best about my dad. Because I want to keep our relationship the same—distant, respectful, loving yet quiet. Midwestern. Because in my Midwest it is impolite to ask. Because it is never a good time to ask. Because I don’t want to know. In short, I am afraid. Afraid of losing that distant and respectful and loving and quiet and tenuous-feeling relationship with my one remaining parent, this relationship we forged after I’d left my hometown and my family in what feels to him, I suspect, a rejection of both.
If I stay quiet at this news, I am not involved. I remain unimplicated. This is my thinking, anyway. Through silence I can somehow remain unclaimed by this place, can watch the construction of such a monument unfold at a safe remove, maintain this digital distance. It will mean what it will mean, and I’ll remain unattached, keep my name from such a club’s membership list, even as I suspect my silence has implicated me from the beginning.
In her essay “White Debt,” Eula Biss outlines what she calls one conundrum of whiteness—we want the comfort of what we have but feel uncomfortable with how we have come to have it.
Passive and indirect, am I watching the carriage rattle toward the elm, telling you all this as my protest? If so, what’s the point?
Disclosure
Do I need to tell you that I am white, that my father is white, that the officer who stopped me all those years ago was white too, that all three of us are white and lived then in a nearly all-white town? I am assuming, for a number of reasons, you already knew.
Do you know because I am talking about small-town Indiana? Because thanks to restrictive covenants, racist banking practices, sundowning laws, legal and extralegal violence, these small Midwestern towns like mine remain almost completely white? Because I was able to drive away that night after the officer’s slur wisped into the dark? Because the officer spat such a slur in such a way in the first place, assuming some perverse solidarity with me, membership in the same silent club that, with my musical tastes, I’d somehow sullied?
I don’t need to tell you that my Midwest can be as harsh and blinding as that officer’s flashlight. That, for all its openness, it can make a body contract, feel cornered and claustrophobic, depending on that body’s shape and hue.
That night, this is what my Midwest looked like to me: silent cornrows slipping through my headlights into darkness. Driving back to my town’s well-lit streets, then home.
2004
I am twenty-six years old when my mother dies and I move back with my dad. I come back to be a comfort, I tell myself. But one day when the emptiness of the town I thought I’d escaped grows too great to bear in silence, I tell my dad about the night I was stopped, about the cop, his sneering slur. Deep in my grief, I want my father to suffer just a little more, right now, in his own greater grief. I want him to see his town through my eyes, to bring him down to my level, to cover him in my muck.
“Why didn’t you say something?” he asks, face alight with genuine rage. We could have called the police, he says. Spoken to someone. Filed a complaint.
Maybe he’s right. It never occurred to me. What could calling the police possibly do? Protest a racist police officer to the police? It seemed a fool’s errand. At best.
Dedication
In 2020, police kill 942 people in the United States of America. Among those killed is George Floyd. Images and videos of Derek Chauvin kneeling on the back of Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes weave themselves into the visual grammar of the internet. You must try hard not to see them.
On July 4, 2020, Black Lives Matters supporters rally in front of Plainfield’s Town Hall, along Highway 40, two blocks from where the Van Buren Elm once stood. A local paper reports, “Plainfield Police Deputy Chief Joe Aldridge said despite a group of counter-protesters wielding at least two long rifles, the gathering was peaceful.”
On September 11, 2020, the Plainfield Celebration of Service Plaza is dedicated just off of Highway 40. A waist-high brick wall surrounds four flagpoles, one flying the American flag, the other three flying the colors of Plainfield’s police, fire, and emergency communication officers. A brick walkway with the names of donors runs from the parking lot to the monument.
Two weeks later, the town of Plainfield presents my father with the Order of the Van Buren Elm for creating the Plaza. The award, its name taken from a little-noticed and long-forgotten austerity protest, is the highest honor my hometown can bestow.
At the bottom, the award reads, “David Weaver is now awarded the Order of the Van Buren Elm, and it is ordered that all residents of the Town should accord him this honor for his noble deeds and distinguished service to the Town of Plainfield.”
No Need
It’s the summer of 2021, and my daughter and I are visiting my father when I trip his house’s security alarm. I punch in the code he gave me not thirty seconds before, but the alarm continues to bleat throughout the neighborhood despite my attempts to silence it. Defeated, I slink outside, ask my dad for help.
Minutes later, his phone rings: the police. The voice on the other end is friendly. Sitting in his backyard, a perfectly clear Midwestern summer sky stretched overhead, my dad assures the officer that everything is fine, we are safe, no need to send a patrol car. Somehow, they end up chatting about detective novels. After giving the officer a few recommendations, my father hangs up. “I think,” he says to me, “they recognize my name from the Plaza.”
The next day, on our way out of town heading west on Highway 40 to visit my grandma, my dad stops the car at the Celebration of Service Plaza. He has something to show my daughter. We walk the path, the bricks underfoot engraved with the names of the monument’s donors. We stop midway, where my father points to the brick he’d purchased for our family. And there it is, my daughter’s name, my wife’s name, my name etched in it, right in front of our toes.
Stop the car
In 2011, NPR featured the Van Buren Elm in its series Honey, Stop the Car: Monuments that Move You. The series ran over the summer, hoping to capture the attention of road-tripping families traveling through out-of-the-way places. Its focus on “little-known memorials” and “long-forgotten monuments” carried with it more than a whiff of kitsch. Appreciating such a dubious pantheon of monuments, the tone of the series suggested, might require an ironic distance large enough to rival the average American road trip.
Irony is how we create meaning from a safe remove. You give a subject your attention while withholding your care. The ironic distance of the NPR series, really, is emotional distance. It weaves the fiction that even as we regard the world, we can remain separate. Put simply, irony allows us the comfort of self deception. “Collusion,” says Biss, “is written into our way of life.” Her essay makes it plain that by “our,” she’s addressing those of us in America who consider ourselves white.
With its first national highway, our country sought to overcome a kind of distance. A distance that separated people, made their lives less real to those who might never see them, regard them, ride through the streets of their hometowns and understand others’ lives in terms of their own. It was this distance the people of Plainfield felt as the country let its highway ruin, the distance they attempted to close by dumping an ex-president in the mud. They didn’t want him to fix their problems from afar. They wanted to force him into the here and now of their lives, destroy whatever it was that held him at such a remove.
Distance, too, is what I wanted from my hometown, what I want now from my father’s monument, what I expected and was granted the night the officer pulled me over for the fact of being there. It’s what I’ve taken as a birthright, to hold myself apart from what I see, to understand without seeing, or, perhaps, to see without understanding.
Distance gives us this idea, this fiction, that once we’ve stopped the car, looked around and snapped a few photos, that we are free to drive away without ever having left a mark.
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