Midwesternities
Accordions
A piano is the instrument of the middle class, but the accordion plays for the people. The burbled tones of an accordion sound for folk singing around the world. It’s portable, compact, and serves for dancing (I’m looking at you, Cajun Zydeco), cafés (bonjour, Paris), and beer halls (Alpen cap optional). I used to think that accordions were uncool, the remnant prejudice from a 50s craze. Then, at a low point in life, I discovered that it’s difficult to be unhappy while listening to an accordion. Even the sad songs satisfy! The music people of film seem to know this secret, as many film scores feature a hidden accordion. In fact, I have my own test of movies, Lori’s accordion test: if there’s an accordion in the movie (shown, played, even just heard in the background), it’s usually the sign of a good movie. Just give it a try: Casablanca? Yes, there’s one played at Rick’s. The Godfather? Oh, yeah, listen to the theme. What about quirky movies, independent films? One of my favorites is John Sayles, Passionfish, which has a lovely Cajun dance sequence with an accordion. Family films? Pixar’s Ratatouille has some wonderful French café accordion throughout. If you like Christmas films, It’s a Wonderful Life passes the test.
Pie
When we came to visit the farm for the weekend, my grandmother would make five or six pies: apple, cherry, pumpkin, pecan, banana cream, even grape. We didn’t need a pie per person, but she believed in abundance of food, even if nowhere else. A crust made from flour, salt, lard, a little sugar, a little water—inexpensive, comforting, flaky—and a filling made from whatever she had at hand. These are the essence of pie, and the humbleness also makes them part of the Midwest. She remembered making pies for threshers, back when farms needed to feed harvest helpers. Pie is simple, but making it takes practice. I expect to see it at small family-owned restaurants, school fundraisers, church suppers. Pie bakers know endless variations (cookie crusts, crumb toppings, savory pies, cream fillings, decorative crusts) for something that most everyone likes. That’s Midwestern.
Yes, that Writer Is Midwestern
Some writers claim their Midwestern roots clearly in their works: Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy Barton, Willa Cather’s My Antonia. Others allow settings of stories to give clue to their past, their growing up years before they took off for more glamorous places: Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams,” Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. But more writers than you might think were born in the Midwest, grew up in the Midwest, possess somewhere in their shaping years this Midwestern DNA, rejected or accepted. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye calls out her Lorain, Ohio roots. Sandra Cisneros wrote The House on Mango Street about growing up in Chicago, a Midwestern city if ever there was one. Curtis Sittenfeld writes of Cincinnati and St. Louis as a knowledgeable resident (the street names and parks, the east/west status divisions of one, the foodways of the other). Whether writers fled with the intention never to return, like Ernest Hemingway, or wandered back from worldly travels with a new eye, like Langston Hughes, the Midwest influences American literary fiction in ways that readers don’t always realize.
Lori J. Williams, Writer 