What I cannot forget is my landlady, who rented my apartment to me over the phone and who, when she first met me, told me I didn’t sound like a colored girl. There was a man who made everything beautiful. There were my friends, who made the isolation bearable. The winters were endless, snow in unfathomable quantities, the aching whine of snowmobiles. During fall, deer hunting, so much venison. There were the abandoned copper mines and the vast majesty of Lake Superior and so much forest cloaking everything. I was a woman out of place but I did not always feel unsafe. We were so far north that my blackness was more curiosity than threat. In my town, the street signs were in both English and Finnish because the town had the highest concentration of Finns outside of Finland. ![]() The next town over, over the portage bridge, had seven thousand people. I lived in a town of four thousand people. I spent five years in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula-a place I didn’t even know existed until I moved there to attend graduate school.
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