americana
finding belonging in America's heartland
Dear friends,
This August, I boarded a night flight to Kalamazoo on the smallest plane I’ve ever seen, where the lone flight attendant had to shift us across the aisle to balance weight. We landed in a beige-and-brick airport that was largely empty of staff by that hour. I found my Lyft, a Toyota Corolla, and watched through the misted window as highway lamps faded and turned to moonlight on cornfields. I stepped out into the southwestern corner of Michigan in a town called Berrien Springs, population two thousand.
“Welcome to America’s heartland,” said my friend Felix’s dad in the morning. “We have a lot to show you.”
In the following weeks, I shot my first gun, watched my first livestock show, picked my first summer squash, and hung out at my first Republican tent. The experiences that are easy to rattle off fit my preconceptions of what I always perceived as the real America: white, conservative, and agrarian. It’s harder—and more important—to explain the experiences that broke caricature: the gas station customers voting for their Pakistani cashier’s grandkid on America’s Got Talent. The carpenter at the Republican tent who taught me about the history of nuclear energy. The pastor from Togo who shared pictures of akoume and fufu from home at a local family dinner.
Like many things so broadly named, the heartland might just be a convenient myth. What defined my experiences in Michigan wasn’t whiteness or Republicanism. Instead, it was new textures and ways of belonging. I met people with a reason to be—and a reason to be together—in the midst of closeness, abundance, and faith.
This letter is an attempt to think out loud about the feelings of belonging that I found and how I’d like to carry it with me. As always, I’d love to hear what you think.
Love,
Mishti
I grew up in Secaucus, New Jersey, a town best known as the last NJ transit train stop before New York City. The train junction is a large orb that rises awkwardly from the swamps, placed at the end of a winding road of warehouses that face the Freedom Tower. We moved here in the early 2000s, before the expansion of the railroad and commuter apartments, while the now-shuttered hotels and factory outlets were still thriving. I spoke Hindi, studied Latin, and heard Spanish on the bus. We were one of the first Indians in our housing complex, but three decades later, Asians outnumber white families here. Our town gym features a Gandhi statue.
The story of Secaucus—or Queens, or Brooklyn—is part of America, perhaps even my favorite part of America. But when I was growing up, it always felt distinct from the real America. The stuff of Little House on the Prairie, Bob Dylan, football, church choirs, and apple pie; the stuff we never had space or money for, like backyards, trampolines, hot tubs, boats, and guns. The real America, I always assumed, happened in those mysterious middle states like Iowa, Nebraska, or Kansas. My visits to Berrien Springs have been my first extended time in a place that I’d identify as part of it.
The first thing I noticed while driving through Berrien Springs was an overwhelming sense of abundance. Backyard gardens dripped with summer squash, berries, and tomatoes. Roads rolled past sheep pens and horse pastures. Cornfields stretched unbounded into forests that could easily envelop and lose a person. When people on the sidewalk asked how I was, they actually stopped to listen.
Two years prior, when the pandemic had started, I’d driven through the midwest to Colorado, on single-lane roads through miles of golden cornfields and endless squares of ranchland. The land was vast and impossible to visualize if not from the windows of a plane. This country has so much wealth, my dad had said, and he didn’t mean the money.
The homes I visited were vast, too. Felix’s parents live in a yellow cottage named Serenity, with a fireplace, rocking chair, and bookshelves of Bibles and sociology texts. Their deep blue kitchen includes baskets of gleaming fruit, yellow wildflowers, an alphabetical spice cabinet, and meals like open-faced sandwiches and bløtkake with cream and berries. White sheets billow on clotheslines and evenings end in the sauna that they built by hand.
“This feels like peak Americana,” I told Felix. “No,” he corrected me, “this is hygge.”
Berrien Springs has an unusually strong international community that includes Felix’s parents, who are originally from Northern Europe and maintain foreign citizenship despite having lived decades in Michigan. They’ve taught university students from dozens of countries, and many of their friends speak multiple languages. In true immigrant style, they’ve even modified their names for the American palette. Despite being longtime residents, they’ve retained delight in local cultural experiences: “Let’s go have a rural American experience,” his dad often said with a twinkle, before we drove out for errands at the farm stop or Rural King to grab hardware.
Berrien Springs’ deep internationalism is rooted in Christianity—specifically, Seventh-day Adventism—as a deep binding glue. The town has a church for every few dozen people, including Lutherans, Catholics, Methodists, and more, but Adventists are the clear plurality.
I learned about the Adventist church relatively recently, but it has quickly won me over. It was formed in the 1800s as an offshoot of Protestantism, with members who observed a Saturday Sabbath, emphasized wellness (with a vegetarian, teetotal, caffeine-free diet), and included abolitionists and pacifist war medics. The church established Andrews University in Berrien Springs soon after its formation. Today, both draw people from hundreds of nations, from Madagascar to Brazil.
Every Sabbath, a feeling of warmth and abundance crescendoes in town. People put aside their work and dress up for morning services and potlucks at their pick of dozens of congregations—Filipino, African, Korean, university, traditionalist, etc. The Andrews student body mobilizes in the late mornings to walk through preened lawns to the cathedral, a prime spot to meet a pretty girl or handsome boy. Felix’s parents and their friends organize their own Sabbath school, where each person takes turns facilitating discussions on themes like death, beauty, egalitarianism, and the environment. The group ran uninterrupted through the pandemic, with dozens of people faithfully clicking into Zoom calls every weekend.
In addition to services and Sabbath school, Felix’s parents and three other church couples have a “soup group” potluck that they have run biweekly for the last fifteen years. I joined one of their gatherings hosted in an Eden-like garden, with lemon scones, fresh fruit and yogurt, coffee, tea, scrambled vegetables, and open-faced sandwiches on a table in front of the tomato vines. When the hostess said a blessing and everyone whispered amen, and an unspoken care hung in the air like honey.
Watching these faith and friendship rituals came with a twinge of yearning. My closest friends stretch across America, if not the world. I often work from a laptop and without a lease, which means that I’ve only interacted with a handful of them since the summer. Every book club, writing group, or discussion circle that I’ve run has naturally fizzled. In the absence of a shared religion, it feels impossible to think of something that would motivate us all to gather weekly—especially virtually—for months, let alone years.
The biggest community event in Berrien Springs is the annual youth fair, a vibrant display of the flavors of the heartland. This year, people from several neighboring towns came to show livestock, pies, flowers, scarecrows, and more around the theme red, white and blue in 2022. The amphitheater hosted daily events including a tractor pull, a demolition derby, a rodeo, and a circus. Food trucks served elephant ears, corn dogs, and caramel apples; barns featured tents of RV salesmen alongside church members with opposing stances on abortion. Fairground merchandise included hats with slogans like if you love your freedom, thank a vet, POW-MIA, US Border Patrol, and even the Confederate flag.
One of the fair’s biggest events was a country music concert featuring Granger Smith, a Texan singer famous for roasting city folks with songs like “Don’t Tread on Me” or “City Boy’s Stuck,” performed by his alter ego Earl Dibbles Junior. We hyped up the concert all day, imagining ourselves as hidden minorities in a sea of MAGA hats. “Wear something red and don’t talk to anyone,” my parents told me.
In reality, the concert featured many cutoffs and cowboy boots but no MAGA hats. Granger Smith was a skinny Christian dad who pulled kids up onstage and smiled wide into their cameras. When he sang “I’m Proud to be an American,” my mind flashed to my elementary choir school concert the week after 9/11, and I whispered along. I caught the eye of a woman singing next to me, and she beamed and nodded. I left the concert feeling nourished, not alienated. I was the only Indian person in attendance, but no one gave me a second glance. I was there, so I was family. Do Democrats have concerts? I wondered. What do we wear together? What do we sing?
I shot my first gun at a range in Berrien Springs a few days after the concert. Our guide was Felix’s friend Willie, a generous man with smiling eyes, a hearty laugh, and buzzed blonde hair. He ran a successful window cleaning business, disdained both Biden and Trump, and owned a large gun collection.
“Why would someone own so many guns?” I wondered on the drive over.
“Why does anyone collect anything?” Felix replied. “For me, it’s musical instruments.”
We turned off past the cornfields and into a winding gravel path until we found Willie’s truck. He had arranged his guns and bullets in neat rows across the entire length of the picnic table, representing thousands of dollars of value. Just weeks after the shooting in Valdez, I felt my heart jump into my throat.
Willie taught me with kind patience about how to hold a gun, load a bullet, manage the safety, and use verbal cues to communicate what I was doing. I handled a Glock handgun, a combat AR9, and more, my chest thumping the whole time. I shot at cardboard outlines of men, metal plates, and weighted bowling pins. The targets clinked down politely, bearing only an occasional pock.
It was strange to reconcile the banality of it all with the fact that I held the potential to murder with the minute possibility—despite all precautions—of an accident, a fall, or a schizophrenic mental lapse. Reporters had written that the children’s bodies in Valdez were nearly unrecognizable when found. I’ve been numbed to the danger of driving a car on the highway, but holding a gun for the first time felt heavier.
As we were leaving, a man with a handlebar mustache rolled up in a banged-up beige sedan. “Do you want to try shooting any of them?” Willie asked him.
“Oh no, that’ll just mean I’ll end up buying them,” the man replied with a chuckle, as they both started discussing the technical specs.
“See?” Felix said to me. “They’re just big nerds.”
When we drove away, the man gave me a nod and a big wave, and I grinned and waved back. He’d probably never seen anyone like me on the range, but, once again, it didn’t matter. Our afternoon could have easily ended in a shared meal. Race and gender were increasingly—refreshingly—irrelevant.
No place, of course, is paradise for everyone. Abundance and belonging often exist with—or because of—hidden histories and textures of hardship. One weekend, Felix and I visited Nikki’s Cafe, the watering hole of downtown Berrien Springs. The diner was a small stone building with a teal interior and cursive signs that said welcome and hot coffee. It was the kind of place where politicians might rub shoulders with farmers for a campaign shoot.
Manning the joint were a matronly woman and her assistant in fishnet tights, heart-shaped glasses, and a pink pixie cut. Several menu items were named after regulars; I ordered Zick’s oatmeal, the namesake of the local butcher. Their signature dish was the magic mountain, a hearty stack of eggs, potatoes, biscuits, and gravy for five dollars. People asked for the usual, everyone was called honey, and there was always more free coffee.
During a lull, I overheard the younger waitress greeting a woman who was alone in a booth.
“How are you doing?” she chirped.
“Not great,” the woman answered. “Long week.”
“Oh,” her voice fell. “Where do you work?”
“The casino.”
“Do you like it?” she piped up.
“No.”
It’s been hard for me too,” the waitress said. “My cousin just died.” She accelerated. “She had two kids and my friend found her overdosed, lying on the floor like nothing was wrong. We really miss her—sorry,” she said, stopping abruptly. “Not the best morning conversation.”
“That’s okay,” the woman replied.
Felix’s dad asked me often about India, if Slumdog Millionaire or White Tiger reflected reality, if it was true that skyscrapers and slums shared the same sidewalks. Urban India wasn’t the only place, I realized, where abundance coexisted with tragedy. Felix’s neighbor had died of alcohol poisoning in his basement as a teenager. A few miles away, a former nonprofit leader lived with a starved pitbull and a daughter struggling with addiction, garbage piling out of every corner. In college, when Felix had bought and fixed a forty-thousand dollar home, he hadn’t lasted long as a landlord. His last tenants were teenage parents who fled with their newborn, leaving truckloads of dirty clothes, soiled food, and cat litter behind.
Mumbai, Manhattan, and rural Michigan may have one thing in common: they are paradise for those who choose to stay and hell for those who cannot choose to leave. Perhaps there is a two-way street between hardship on one side and the community, rituals, and symbolism that it engenders on the other. “Disaster is sometimes a door back into paradise,” writes Rebecca Solnit in A Paradise Built in Hell. “The paradise in which we are who we hope to be, do the work we desire, and are each our sister’s and brother’s keeper.”
Near the end of the county fair, I draped myself in Felix’s oversized camo t-shirt and walked to the Republican HQ, one of the only permanent buildings on the fairgrounds. A blonde lady waved me in and gestured to the back of the room, where a state senate candidate was speaking to voters. I looked up and felt suddenly self-conscious, slinking to the side of the room to flip through candidate flyers in order to avoid eye contact. Finally, I saw an author with Einstein-like hair and a shirt advertising laser tattoo removal, and I ventured to ask what books he was signing.
Borys’ passion was rescuing sunken US naval airplanes from Lake Michigan, and his endeavor had spawned a one-hundred and sixty pages of writing. He told me he was famous and showed me emails about naval vessel rescue from the Smithsonian, NASA, and the Australian government. He talked fast, skipped transitions, and smack-talked some of the others in the tent, at one point making me watch the entirety of Train’s “50 Ways to Say Goodbye” to understand how he felt about one of them. The only question he asked me, a few minutes into our discussion, was “Are you conservative?”—and he hurtled on without listening to my fumbled answer.
Borys welcomed me into the circle of stout older men around Jonathan Lindsey, the state senate candidate. There were some standard talking points—cutting taxes, reducing the deficit, teaching the Constitution in schools—and some surprising ones, like a rallying cry for nuclear energy. I later learned that the quiet, reedy man who I’d assumed was a nuclear physicist was the carpenter who’d done Felix’s counters. Everyone was kind and waited for the others to finish their questions. Most were there to say hi to their friends, trading doughy handshakes and family news.
Again, in reality, the Republican tent didn’t warrant much hype. No one cared that I was an Indian girl from New Jersey who worked in tech, had attended Princeton, and wasn’t obviously conservative. Of course, not everyone had the same reception. Another Democrat, who entered only to fall into an immediate argument about the invasion of Ukraine, lasted just a few minutes.
“Where are you from?” Borys hissed at him, narrowing his eyes. He turned to me and whispered conspiratorially, “I can tell when people have an accent.”
“Classic strategy,” the man told me before he left. “Othering me right away.”
At the tent I asked questions, smiled a lot, and mostly listened. As with any political gathering, there were extreme statements made (one man, at one point, pulled me aside and confided that we lacked political support for nuclear energy because some people out there wanted to bring the world’s population to 500,000).
If people had asked me more about myself, I’m not sure what I would’ve said—but I wish I had more time to figure it out. Weeks after leaving, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. There aren’t many spaces in my life that I can visit, sans affiliation, to speak with people who identify with different symbols—which is part of the motivation for the conversational project I mentioned at the start of this piece. I love being a student of the local bar and diner scenes wherever I go, though interaction with strangers isn’t always the default expected behavior. When the fair ended, my watering hole did, too.
One of my favorite remnants of the trip were the messages I exchanged with Willie after I’d asked him to help me learn more about the weapons we’d used and their typical context.
“We all have more in common than we realize,” I texted him, after saying thanks. “Good people trying to live healthy and happy lives. It’s just more tempting to make political caricatures.”
“Exactly,” he said. “I tell my friends that all the time. That all the people in the world want generally the same thing, to have and take care of their family, leave their kids better off than they were, and be comfortable. I used to think it was just the Republicans that had the wall building issue. But I’m afraid that since COVID and Trump that Democrats have been doing it as well. Now, when I hear people talking about “the other,” both sides seem to have lost sight of the fact that “the other” are people just like them that love this land, this country, as much or more.”
Wherever we may be, whether New York or Indiana, we are creatures of love, tribes, and connection. We need stories and symbols to share. People in Berrien Springs created a default way of belonging that I don’t always feel so strongly in Secaucus or New York City. The connective tissues here are more numerous and less overlapping, perhaps by virtue of a larger population or variance in faith and race. To find the same density of belonging, I might have to start somewhere more constrained, like a specific church, temple, or, as a friend joked, the local yoga studio.
I like to imagine the different cultural codes and frameworks I’ve started to observe in America as partially overlapping tree rings. Urban and rural towns vary in population, religious adherence, livelihoods and people’s connections to the land, but there is something to learn from how each place creates a sense of belonging. The overlaps are far stronger than we realize, and dipping into them is perhaps the most glorious part of being alive.
Thanks to everyone in Berrien Springs for their hospitality and kindness, and Ally, Kiley, Santi, and my sister and parents for reading drafts of this piece.
Mishti!! What a wonderfully written piece - bridging the gap between cultures, families, what home means. "We are creatures of love, tribes, and connection. We need stories and symbols to share" Such a pleasure to read.
Didn’t realize this piece was from 2022 until I came to leave a comment.. If you had written and released this piece last week, it would’ve fit just fine - which says a lot about the tension of the present, and how we exercise animosity because of msm and louder voices out there.
I grew up in a small town close to Berrien Springs, and I now live in Austin. It’s beautiful to think of the ways my life could have unfolded if I had stayed.. maybe I’d find a Gandhi statue somewhere in that little downtown, something like you have in Secaucus.
I especially love the compassion with which you covered your experiences in, which is not easy as an Indian girl in a Camo jacket. I understand and resonate with that dichotomy, but it’s a small chunk of the battle our parents chose to fight and embrace when they chose to immigrate here years ago. I think that’s why I felt a lot of solace in your piece, although it’s 2 years old, it felt like a weighted blanket in this post-election winter.