which meant that they were still one hundred and forty-three miles away from the fort Jean-Patrice Laconte had built in 1687 when first settling this land for the French. The remains of Laconte’s fort were historical landmark number one along the road to Nashville and, with the exception of a potential detour to Springfield to see Lincoln’s home, were at the top of my father’s list of the important places in history he wanted to see on this trip.
He had made a list of at least a dozen such places that he planned to someday visit, most of them scattered around the Midwest where less notable bits of history were easy to stumble upon. He hadn’t mentioned wanting to stop anywhere to his wife before they left. He was afraid of what the explanation would have sounded like, having already tried a couple of variations in his head.
There are some places I want to stop at before we get to Nashville.
There is an important historical landmark on the way to Nashville.
He had given up after that, confident that his desire to delve into the obscure parts of the country’s history made sense only to him. Since arriving in America, he had tried to come up with a series of standards by which he could judge his assimilation. He gave himself points for knowing answers to certain questions, like which teams were playing football that Monday night, or which television actresses he would most want to sleep with and which ones he wouldn’t. If while at the plant one of his coworkers said, “Hey, Yosef, who’s that playing on the radio?” and he responded correctly by saying Ray Charles, then at least one, sometimes two points were added to the poorly tracked column in which these things were supposed to matter.
It had been almost a year since he had begun keeping track, but there still weren’t enough points in his column to satisfy him, and undoubtedly he failed by almost any measure to appear as a real American. Unlike the other men at the plant, he spoke very little while he was at work. He knew that too many words and sentences strung together on his part were an open invitation to be mocked. If he said anything more than “Mr. Henderson, I have finished with the task you have given me,” he could expect to hear his words echoed back to him in a comical but perhaps not so far from the truth accent, and so he kept his mouth shut and spoke in grunts or, better yet, gestures when he could.
He wanted other inroads into America, and his list of historical landmarks was his most recent one. By his reckoning, the more obscure the landmark the better. Anyone in the world could claim to have laid eyes on the country’s more famous or important monuments. There were plenty of immigrants in D.C., New York, and Boston who could see towering skyscrapers or marble monuments out their living room windows, but where did that get them? Nowhere, he thought. It meant nothing to stand in the shadows of such buildings if you didn’t know the history that preceded them, and if you didn’t believe that as a result of that knowledge they belonged to you as well.
My father planned on rectifying some of that that afternoon. He had read about Laconte’s fort in a small pamphlet at the immigration office in Chicago where he had declared his intentions to someday be a citizen of the United States. The pamphlet, titled “A Brief History of Our Great State,” concerned itself mostly with facts about Lincoln and the post-Civil War years. Only one paragraph at the beginning had mentioned Laconte and a few other early explorers. “Pioneers of the American wilderness,” it had called them, with Laconte as chief among them; this had been enough to convince him of the path he needed to seek out. Afterward he could say, “This is very similar to an early American landmark ...” or “This reminds me of an old American fort that I visited,” and anyone who heard him would be impressed and would think, Look how far he has come.
He understood that he
He had made a list of at least a dozen such places that he planned to someday visit, most of them scattered around the Midwest where less notable bits of history were easy to stumble upon. He hadn’t mentioned wanting to stop anywhere to his wife before they left. He was afraid of what the explanation would have sounded like, having already tried a couple of variations in his head.
There are some places I want to stop at before we get to Nashville.
There is an important historical landmark on the way to Nashville.
He had given up after that, confident that his desire to delve into the obscure parts of the country’s history made sense only to him. Since arriving in America, he had tried to come up with a series of standards by which he could judge his assimilation. He gave himself points for knowing answers to certain questions, like which teams were playing football that Monday night, or which television actresses he would most want to sleep with and which ones he wouldn’t. If while at the plant one of his coworkers said, “Hey, Yosef, who’s that playing on the radio?” and he responded correctly by saying Ray Charles, then at least one, sometimes two points were added to the poorly tracked column in which these things were supposed to matter.
It had been almost a year since he had begun keeping track, but there still weren’t enough points in his column to satisfy him, and undoubtedly he failed by almost any measure to appear as a real American. Unlike the other men at the plant, he spoke very little while he was at work. He knew that too many words and sentences strung together on his part were an open invitation to be mocked. If he said anything more than “Mr. Henderson, I have finished with the task you have given me,” he could expect to hear his words echoed back to him in a comical but perhaps not so far from the truth accent, and so he kept his mouth shut and spoke in grunts or, better yet, gestures when he could.
He wanted other inroads into America, and his list of historical landmarks was his most recent one. By his reckoning, the more obscure the landmark the better. Anyone in the world could claim to have laid eyes on the country’s more famous or important monuments. There were plenty of immigrants in D.C., New York, and Boston who could see towering skyscrapers or marble monuments out their living room windows, but where did that get them? Nowhere, he thought. It meant nothing to stand in the shadows of such buildings if you didn’t know the history that preceded them, and if you didn’t believe that as a result of that knowledge they belonged to you as well.
My father planned on rectifying some of that that afternoon. He had read about Laconte’s fort in a small pamphlet at the immigration office in Chicago where he had declared his intentions to someday be a citizen of the United States. The pamphlet, titled “A Brief History of Our Great State,” concerned itself mostly with facts about Lincoln and the post-Civil War years. Only one paragraph at the beginning had mentioned Laconte and a few other early explorers. “Pioneers of the American wilderness,” it had called them, with Laconte as chief among them; this had been enough to convince him of the path he needed to seek out. Afterward he could say, “This is very similar to an early American landmark ...” or “This reminds me of an old American fort that I visited,” and anyone who heard him would be impressed and would think, Look how far he has come.
He understood that he
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