ONE-DIMENSIONAL HONORS
The names carved into the frieze of the State Library project an image of greatness. Ah, what a rich mosaic of Illinois' literature would have been depicted had just a few more names been squeezed into the stone

Essay by Maureen Foertsch McKinney

Hecht. Hemingway. Sandburg. Sinclair. Together these Illinois authors project an image of greatness. As Illinoisans who helped to craft the literature of the prairie state, they represent just a few of the nearly three dozen writers chosen in 1989 to grace the exterior of the Illinois State Library, built the following year across the street from the state Capitol in Springfield.

Out of hundreds of possibilities, a committee of four chose 35 writers the state would honor. Their names were carved into the frieze of the new Beaux Arts-style building.

Ah, what a rich mosaic of Illinois literature would have been depicted had just a few more names been squeezed onto the stone. Though the authors selected were intended as a study in diversity, not one of the writers is of Hispanic or Asian descent. Nor is much philosophy outside the frame of the mainstream represented.

Where are native Illinoisans Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros and John DOS Passes? Where is the angry black poet Langston Hughes, who spent a share of his adolescence in downstate Lincoln? What about Li-Young Lee, an acclaimed Asian-American poet, who has chosen to make Chicago his home?

Had Castillo or Cisneros been selected, they would have been the only Hispanic writers to grace the frieze. As it stands, a vibrant tile in the mosaic that is Illinois' literary heritage is missing. This is certainly the case in 2000, when 10.5 percent of Illinoisans are Hispanic. And in 2025, the Illinois Hispanic population is projected to be 2.3 million, which would make Latinos the most sizable minority group in the state.

Look at the bright splashes Cisneros adds to a portrait of Illinois. Her Chicago is a gritty, colorful place. Cisneros, whose The House on Mango Street is semi-autobiographical, began the novel when she was a graduate student at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. Distance had given her a different perspective on her hometown.

"Until Iowa City, I assumed the world was like Chicago, made up of people of many cultures all living together," she writes in her introduction to a second edition of Mango Street. Her narrative style reflects that diversity. "It's very much an anti-academic voice, a spoken voice, the voice of a Mexican American."

It is as a Chicana that award-winning Chicago native Ana Castillo draws inspiration for her novels and poetry.

Castillo sets her latest novel. Peel My Love Like an Onion, in Chicago, her real-life hometown. "But you can say this is my city because Chicago is big and small enough to be your city, to be anybody's city who wants it, anybody at all. Like Nelson Algren said right around the time you were born — Chicago ... forever keeps two faces ... one face for the Go-Getters and one for the Go-Get-It-Your-selfers. "

Poet Langston Hughes wrote often of Chicago in his nonfiction work. Sometimes the picture is flattering. Often it is not. But what he paints with his imagistic brush reflects the

26 December 2000 Illinois Issues www.uis.edu/~ilissues

broad spectrum of viewpoints that is Illinois.

"The eternal Chicago wind whistles by bringing long months of snow, sleet, rain and recently a breath of delayed spring. When the window is open even a crack, the wind blows all the papers on my table," he wrote in a 1949 essay.

"Chicago's wind goes well with the town because it is a big rough-neck city, a kind of American Shanghai, dramatic and dangerous, one of the cradles of the atom bomb, Carl Sandburg's 'hog butcher to the world' perfumed with stock-yard scents.... It is a Joe Louis town with a knockout punch in its steel mills and stock yards. It is a Katherine Dunham town, seductive, determined, theatrical and clever. It's a Yancey town with a heart-throb like boogie-woogie."

That is a bit of his introduction to an essay he wrote about what it was like to experience Chicago outside of its Bronzeville "Black Belt" as he called it: "No el trains cut the quiet. No winos mother-foul the evening air. No jitneys blow their horns. ...

"Here in the University's [of Chicago] sociology classes students only study about such things, but do not live them. The 'Black Metropolis' is a book in the library."

And he sketches a multilayered portrait of a deep southern Illinois in the 1950s. In "A Sentimental Journey to Cairo, Illinois," a 1954 essay for the Chicago Defender, Hughes writes, "In telling of how he became interested in Negro folk music, Mr. [W.C.] Handy says that when he was a little boy in a rock quarry in the Deep South, he used to hear the workmen singing a song that went something like this:

And this song made him wonder what was wrong with Cairo. ... Cairo is a levee town three hundred and sixty miles south of Chicago, on the Mississippi, at the extreme southern tip of Illinois. Several months ago it was in the news a great deal when the legal battle to integrate the schools there was at its height."

Hughes writes that though mob violence was feared and the town had a reputation for a racist character, nothing happened to him until it was time for him to leave and he met a "courageous white man in Southern Illinois who believes in democracy, equality and decency" and paid for it by having rocks thrown through his window. "Having seen Cairo I can never forget it — nor the stones that are still being thrown there at democracy." What inspiring and surprisingly gentle words from an outspoken man.

Why is Hughes not on the frieze?

And why is John Dos Passes not there, though he was considered a major figure in 20th century literature? Born on Chicago's Lakeshore Drive to a wealthy lawyer, the son of a Portuguese immigrant, Dos Passes had a view of Illinois from its poshest perspective. Yet he often spoke in favor of the underdog, which led him to consider communism, eventually negatively.

It's hard to imagine why Illinoisan Li-Young Lee isn't among the honored few. Lee, a true citizen of the world, has published several volumes of poetry and has won multiple prizes. He was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. His family had moved from Indonesia to Hong Kong to Macau to Japan by the time he was 7. But he has lived in the United States since 1964 and counts Chicago as his home.

The immigrant experience gently shades his poetic portraits as evidenced in this excerpt from I ask my mother to sing:

I've never been in Peking, or the
    Summer Palace,
nor stood on the great Stone Boat
    to watch
the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake,
    the picnickers
running away in the grass.

But I love to hear it sung;
how the waterlilies fill with rain until
they overturn, spilling water into
    water,
then rock back, and fill with more.

Li-Young Lee, like so many writers who were not selected for the frieze, has enriched the tapestry that is Illinois' literature, by sharing his transcultural literary tradition.

Should the powers that be decide someday to add a second row of names, they should strive to portray the multi-ethnic richness that encompasses the mosaic of Illinois' writing.

Castillo. Cisneros. Hughes. Lee.

www.uis.edu/~ilissues Illinois Issues December 2000 27