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142 DOI: 10.7330/9780874218930.c08 Eight Life in a Cornfield A couple of years later, in Bloomington, Indiana, I met my future wife, Rosan Augusta Jordan, probably first while she put in a few hours staffing the desk at the Indiana University Folklore Library (the folklore collection was housed separately at that time). She had finished her coursework and doctoral exams, completed her dissertation fieldwork in Texas and Mexico, and came back to work on the diss in Bloomington’s familiar atmosphere. She came into my life with her own set of stories that helped to give her a past and identity to me. I cannot say that stories played a key role in our getting together, but in retrospect, her stories seem important. Stories are one of the chief ways that we know others, whether friends or lovers or even acquaintances: who they and their families are, where they have been, what they have experienced, how they got to where they are now. If “they” are a potential mate, stories can shed light on a background as well as fill in the blanks of a larger whole. Stories—narrative blocks that amplify and call special attention to personal meanings and memories—are crucial to understanding another person. Rosan’s stories include how faithful slaves used wheelbarrows to carry the bodies of family members killed in The War home to Georgia; how ancestor Joseph Jefferson Carson, during the beginning of Reconstruction when carpetbaggers encouraged ex-slaves to sit in church in the downstairs pews with the white folk, would thump the floor with his gold-handled cane and thunder, “Get back upstairs where you belong, you black bastards !”; being refused service in a Texas cafeteria during a drive home from IU with several fellow students because one was black; and leaving at dusk on family trips west and driving through the night, not stopping until they saw the oil-field flare burning off gas in Hobbs, New Mexico. Or about working at the Pentagon after living in DC following college, in the operation that was just becoming involved in Vietnam, and where she had to Life in a Cornfield 143 have a Top Secret clearance and took her turn in shutting sensitive material away in a safe at night. In one story that didn’t directly involve her, several members of her office went to Japan on a mission and decided to take along a lowly GS–5 to do the scut work. The folks in Japan assumed he was a GS–15 to go on such a trip and assigned him to the officers’ mess until his true rank was discovered, whereupon he was relegated to the outer darkness and the officials who brought him got fussed at. More stories include going to the Five Spot in New York with a Brooklyn-born, jazz-fan boyfriend to hear Monk and running into a drunken Jack Kerouac who asked her boyfriend if he could kiss her and did. And after growing up with the idea that the South and Texas were primitive and the North was civilized and modern, her shock at Bloomington and the primitive state of some people’s lives there—with shacks and outside privies. She once took me on a tour of areas of Bloomington that I would otherwise have never seen; outhouses were still in place. People’s stories—personal narratives, family saga—take us into their lives, and these stories took me into hers. As for the Bloomington stories I’ve told over the years, I suppose that they served to highlight my own passing, like some of my ancestors, into the world of the American heartland; although by the 1960s it was less a heartland of hardy pioneers and romantic Indians and more an uneasy one of distrust of the bearded or protesting students. Arriving in Bloomington by plane after a couple of post-India weeks in New York in 1967, landing in what must have been a little puddle-jumper out of Indianapolis, I seemed to alight in the middle of a cornfield. I know that corn grew alongside the airfield, though perhaps my expectations put it there or increased its extent. I was going to the Midwest—the land of waves of corn—so naturally, it greeted me there and informed me of where I was: a place where the hicks were called “Hoosiers” and corn was the coin of the realm. Years later—I love to tell this as...

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