"The beauty in the everyday": On Samuel Love’s "The Gary Anthology"

Samuel Love, Editor | The Gary Anthology | Belt Publishing | September 2020 | 224 Pages

Gary is a city of monikers. Within the last few decades, these names invoke an interpretation of Gary, like much of the Midwest’s Rust Belt, as decaying and dead. Samuel Love’s edited volume, The Gary Anthology, rebukes miserabilist interpretations of the city as Scary Gary and the Murder Capital. Love is clear about the conditions in the city that have led to these interpretations of the city. In 2013, a survey found that almost twenty percent of Gary’s buildings were unoccupied. Love and many of the contributors rebuke the outside gaze of commuters and strangers to the lakefront city. As Love laments, “We are continuously fringed—at times as the dirty, industrial, southeastern fringe of the Chicago metropolitan area, a place through which to move people and goods as quickly as possible, fit only as a location for dumps, depots, and deportation flights.” The outside gaze of those just passing through cannot find what photographer Raymar Brunson called “The beauty in the everyday.” However, as Latrice Young declares in “#NotMiserableInGary:

But don’t mistake the downs for a lack of ups

Our motto’s still focus on the love

focus on the positives

and congratulate the artists here

when you see their work

Because when you give your community

what they truly deserve,

they will always pour back into you.

We may have a lot of cleaning up to do

but we are hopeful, not miserable.

Young’s fellow contributors highlight a city’s rich history constantly in the stages of reinventing and reimagining itself. The collection is full of talented voices, and unfortunately, too many to cover in this review. The Gary Anthology joins Cleveland-based Belt Publishing City Anthology Series, a series dedicated to spotlighting some of the Rust Belt’s less-covered cities. The anthology is the first to cover a town in Indiana. It offers a possible bridge with Belt Publishing’s Rust Belt Chicago: An Anthology to illuminate the Calumet Region. The volume consists of an introduction and seven sections. These sections include “Of Family and Legends,” “Steel,” “Photographs,” “Gary Poetry,” “Stories of the Land and Environment,” “Around Town,” and “Now and Next: The Future of Gary, Indiana.” These sections organize the responses to Love’s prompt of each contributor “to write about a place or moment here that has meaning to you.”

Kwabena Sakidi Jijaga Rasuli’s reflections in “Malcolm X Boulevard” cover the push to rename Virginia and Georgia Street after the civil rights leader. The piece blends Gary’s history as a center for Black political power and culture. The activism by a group of Gary residents to have the written landscapes reflect that history. Rasuli recalled that the inscribed into the city’s street names were the names of presidents and slaveholders. A predominantly Black city with a single street named after Martin Luther King. The piece noted the years of work that Rasuli and his fellow activists committed to the name change, which happened by executive order in 2019. The essay concludes by noting how the renaming connects Gary with cities and neighborhoods like Dallas, Harlem, Boston, and Lansing, Michigan. As Rasuli argues, “We need to constantly be improving ourselves and Malcolm was an example of that, of sacrifice and organization all around.”

The contributors range from native residents to the city, lifelong Region Rats, former residents, and even transplants to the city. Terra “Poetry ‘N’ Motion” Cooks’ a recent transplant to Gary, blends autobiography and poetry in “What I Gained by Moving to Gary,” and their labeling of the city as vanilla flavor. Cooks states that “Vanilla has a flavor of its own but it also complements so many other flavors.” Their first poem in the story reflects the back-and-forth for Cooks and her familiarity and unfamiliarity with the city.

I’m torn between leaving Gary and protecting it.

I came to breathe life into it.

Instead, it breathed life into me.

I’m torn between leaving Gary or to continue building it.

I came to build it up, but instead, it built it up me.

I’m torn between leaving Gary and staying for the renaming of it.

And just as I was getting to know Gary, I also got to know me.

For many of the contributors, like Cooks, their pieces represent a labor of love as they reflect on the city Gary was and as they re-imagine the town it is and will be. Cook’s honesty demonstrates a spirit of the volume, a spirit that finds itself reinvigorated and simultaneously challenged by the city.

Telling the story of Gary, Indiana, especially its recent history, is no easy task. It is easy to dismiss the once “Magic City of Steel” and reminisce nostalgically at what it once was. However, the volume and range of poetry, essays, and even photographs express Gary’s virality. For those that remain and call Gary home, the city’s best days are still ahead.

Tyrell Anderson’s concluding piece notes the stakes of this work. As Anderson states, “When a building is torn down we lose something visible and tangible. And sadly we are not addressing ways to fill in the spaces that have been left. Even though we are tearing down a lot of the blight there are not plans to reactivate those spaces.”

As Gary continues to change its image and alter its visible landscapes, the city should take time to find the “beauty in the everyday.” In doing so, the city administration, much like The Gary Anthology, must continue to amplify the voices and dedication of the many people in the city working to preserve Gary’s story.

Amid the prevailing need to show progress by demolishing the past, the authors’ fantastic contributions in The Gary Anthology show that the city has a rich history.

Gary is vibrantly alive and always has been.