This essay is published as part of Sixty’s Midwest Arts Writers Fellowship, a 6-month opportunity for writers to develop, refine, and publish writings on topics that are relevant to Indigenous, trans, queer, diasporic, and/or disabled artists and arts workers in our region. Each Fellow will publish two essays that reflect on the complexities of Midwest life and the artists who help define and articulate its culture. Read more writing by the Fellows here.
Using work from East St. Louis artist Allena Marie Brazier’s “Building Abandonment-Place Marker” photography series, as well as my own photographs, poems and recollections, I am constructing a performance on paper. This piece is a visioning. This piece is a meditation on abandonment. This piece is about the linguistics of pollution, and how it is a passive construction. Pollution is what is left behind. Pollution is the object. Pollution is the result. “Pollution” is the word created by an industry that does not want to be named. Pollution belongs to Monsanto Chemical, Pfizer Chemical, Big River Zinc, Cerro Copper, Violia; it does not belong to East St. Louis.
East St. Louis is still here.
Three deer stepped into the intersection of Kingshighway and St. Clair. A misty morning. One of those suspended, dewy times. The world on mute except for the whisper roar of tires on the overpass. The frost burning away. The sun up and not up. I beat the world to the punch and caught nature finishing its work. Three deer across from the medium security prison. A bevy? A bunch? A parcel? Not quite a herd. Tip toeing in that snobbish way deer test the asphalt like it is beneath them. Like they’re walking on to a suspension bridge. Revealing themselves carefully. Making certain of their footing. They can’t believe we’re still here. Neither can I.
The poet Tongo Eisen-Martin said:
“If there is a prison in your city, then your city is a prison.”
Dear Monsanto,
If there is pollution in your company, then is your company pollution?
![Image: This playground is located at Frank Holten State Park, 4500 Pocket Road, East St. Louis IL 62205. According to Spectrum News: “ . . . Gov. J.B. Pritzker and others announced 55 [electric vehicle] chargers would be placed at state parks and Department of Natural Resource sites. One of the first is already in place at Frank Holten State Park . . .”. The image shows a yellow, blue, and red playground with a line of trees behind it. A bright orange garden box has been placed next to the playground. Allena Brazier, "Building Abandonment" series, photography with hand built garden box, East St. Louis, 2022. Photo courtesy of the artist.](https://sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Brazier8-1024x774.jpg)
I searched all over Frank Holten State Park, looking for those chargers. They were nowhere to be found. I checked an app that logs the location of electric vehicle chargers. The chargers were at the local casino.
The median income in East St. Louis is $21,199. Would we rather gamble on a Nissan Leaf or a slot machine?
. . . the movie of my life
will be about getting
out of this city
ms. redmond.
the cages of their
smiles open
often, but only half
laughs escape.
* * *
does this place exist
at night? i’m someone else
ms. redmond
what about you?
they want
to know
who i am.
i’m your new english teacher
the year is half over,
they half believe me.
– excerpt from “it’s halfway through the school year” (after “green eyes” by erekah badu)
The place marker is photographed in various locations where the land holds an ambiguous stillness (in between states) of what was, what is, and what will be. Life-Culture-Growth- Continues. – Allena Marie Brazier
The city concerns itself with afterlife between 89th and 20th Avenue:
Greater New Covenant,
Apostolic Christian Center,
Fresh Start Apostolic Faith Ministry,
True Faith Baptist Church,
New Jerusalem Seventh Day Adventist Church,
New McCasland Temple Deliverance Center,
Holiness Sanctification,
Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church,
St. John/Brown AME Zion Church,
Refuge Temple Pentecostal Church of Christ,
Greater Saint Mark Church of God in Christ
Southern Mission Baptist Church
Mohammed Mosque 28,
& New Life Community Church.
In the afterlife there is no ecological terror. No tasteless, odorless spirit possessing the land. Possessing us. Covenants are never broken. We see a sanctified land just beyond deliverance. The afterlife. The new life.
Who do we submit our questions to? One query for every child’s body:
I.
Is it true that mother and children all slept in one room?
II.
Which of us abandoned them first?
III.
Is it true there were no smoke detectors?
IV.
How did the landlord move them from one property damaged by fire to another where a fire began?
V.
How can we sleep with all this burning?
This city, this community, is all we have to hold us. This land is where we are buried.
The deer know we are here. The native plants know we are here, and when we leave a house empty, they come to stay. We are never abandoned.
Is “abandonment” a just another word for death? The native Mississippi people who stewarded the land on which East St. Louis now stands believed that to abandon the memory of an ancestor was the final death.
The city is a holding place. Not a prison but under surveillance. Waiting. A purgatory. A death camp beneath a municipality. A repository for “despite.” An angel’s origin story.
The city composes itself between mirrors. The city looks over its shoulder ad infinitum. Stretching before itself and behind itself.
The city was Cahokian.
The city was Illini
The city was Miami
The city was Ioway
The city was Mascouten
The city was Shawnee
The city was Winnebago (Ho-Chunk)
The city was Settler. Was Colonialist.
The city was white.
East St. Louis is
Flint is
Saginaw is
Detroit is
Gary.
East St. Louis is still here.
* * *
This fellowship is made possible with support from Arts Midwest. Arts Midwest supports, informs, and celebrates Midwestern creativity. They build community and opportunity across Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Wisconsin, the Native Nations that share this geography, and beyond. As one of six nonprofit United States Regional Arts Organizations, Arts Midwest works to strengthen local arts and culture efforts in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, state agencies, private funders, and many others. Learn more at artsmidwest.org.
About the author: Dr. Treasure Shields Redmond is a dual citizen of Meridian, Mississippi and East St. Louis, Illinois. She is a published poet, master educator, community arts organizer, and culture keeper. As a teen, she was signed to M.C. Hammer’s label as a hip hop artist and writer. She is the author of chop: a collection of kwansabas for fannie lou hamer (2015) and is the co-founder of Fannie Lou Hamer House, an artist’s retreat located in Illinois. Dr. Shields Remond is also the founder of The Community Archive, a non profit where she teaches communities how to collect their elders’ oral histories. Treasure’s work centers East St. Louis, Illinois, an all Black township on the eastern banks of the Mississippi river. Through the story of the Sunshine Cultural Arts Center, and its founder Sylvester “Sunshine” Lee, Treasure explores how arts institutions can be a model of community care in the ”rust belt.”
