Introduction

JOHN FREEMAN

For much of my life home has been elsewhere. Both of my parents grew up in cities they felt compelled to leave, so for a decade my family livedelsewhere: in Cleveland, where my parents met, then on Long Island, where my father found work, and later—for the longest stretch of time—in a small Pennsylvania town called Emmaus, where my mother and father made a home. There I walked to school on cracked sidewalks beneath maple trees so large my fearless brothers thought twice about climbing them. The Lehigh Valley rose above and around us like a smoke ring. Night felt like a well.

We lived in Emmaus for just six years but until recently it was the only home I’d known. It had the moody, memorable rhythms of a home. On clear afternoons our high school pep band marched the streets belting out songs, tossing batons. On snowy winter mornings my brothers and I curled around the radio, listening for school district closings. Upon hearing East Penn Schools, we bolted into the yard to build castles from chest-high drifts carved by snowplows. Summers, the soft June air would be pierced by the whine of far-off drag races.

I never knew there could be a difference between where you are from and what you call home until my family left Pennsylvania in 1984. My father had a new job in Sacramento. We were going home—to his home, and like almost every trip my family took, we drove. The United States unpeeled before our station wagon packed with coloring books and our springer spaniel Tracy, who curled up into a ball the size of a danish and slept most of the way. Everything else we owned was stuffed into a moving van driven ahead of us by a guy named Kool. As Ohio opened up into Iowa and then to the broad terrifying expanse of Kansas, I thought, this is where I’m from.

I didn’t know it then but California would become where I was from. My family adapted to long, even seasons and shallow nights and hot lungfuls of valley air. It would be a decade before I felt again the lonesome hollow in my chest a fall day can give you. I lost my nickname and my brothers reinvented themselves too in minor ways. It wasn’t odd to see palm trees or to think about everything east of us as “back there,” to not even think about the past at all. To just get in a car and drive somewhere alone to see how fast the machine could go.

Movement is a particularly American metaphor because agency is one of the nation’s obsessions. It is part of America’s mythology that you make your fate. You can decide, and then become, whatever or whoever it is you wish to be. In a country which takes such poor care of its weak—which has been and continues to be so hostile to visitors—it feels especially cruel to play this dream song. And yet everywhere the tune hums: in presidential speeches, advertisements, church services, in pop music and books and films. It is the melody of American life.

I have come to believe that home is the antidote to myths such as this one, myths that hover outside the reach of so much human life, creating a low pressure system of unhappiness in between the ground and sky. Perhaps we truly need to become in order to be, but however speedily or sluggishly that evolution proceeds, we need a narrative space in which we tell and live the story of our lives—and that space is called a home. In this sense, a home is not a fixed place, or even necessarily a stable one. The last decade of migration ought to tell us that. Rather, home is a space we have exerted ourselves against to make a corner of it ours. Home is a place we claim or allow ourselves to be claimed by.

Part of making and preserving this space is telling it. The writers collected in this issue ofFreeman’s are caught in the middle of that act. As readers, I invite you to eavesdrop on their narrative hammering, to watch them raise the roof beams. These are intimate, difficult, sometimes amusing, and beautifully textured stories—true and otherwise—poems, and photographs. For a child, a home is the original sensory map, and so several stories begin right there, with that first surveying of the territory.

Xiaolu Guo describes her childhood in a small fishing village in China, where she was raised by her frail grandmother and hard-­drinking, cruel grandfather. For Thom Jones, home was the aisles of a general store which his grandmother ran during the Depression in Illinois. Passersby were so hun