LETTERS FROM HOME: DEFENDING IRREPLACEABLE PLACES WHERE WE LIVE

Feb. 1, 1996

Dear Julie,

Where is the heart of a city? In your town it's easily found. The square, with all the extraordinary stores and most colorful bars. I still tell people about the Jambalaya. All those guitar buskers and sunners and the All-Species Day Parade and good old weird Don selling hotdogs on the corner. The life of the town begins and ends there.

The heart of Cape Girardeau beats a little more regularly and over a wider area. We've grown across an interstate highway and turned farms into subdivision at the boundaries, but the heart remains where the city fathers and mothers first fished and cut bait on the banks of the Mississippi.

Here, in an area of a few blocks built on bluffs that overlook the river, is the heart. The Common Pleas Courthouse is at its center, but the blocks all encompass the houses and businesses that gave the city its start and hardily endure. In good weather, DC and I walk these blocks for the sheer pleasure of their company.

Representatives of the federal government are in town for a hearing tonight. They're deciding where to locate a new federal building. They need a full city block as close to the old courthouse as possible.

The new building is not the size of a city block, but they want the whole block for parking and security purposes. What we've come to, perhaps post- Oklahoma City, is a government that presumes a need to build fortresses to protect itself against its own people.

But that isn't what's upsetting some people hereabouts. The high anxiety comes from the government designating two of the city's most beautiful and historic residential blocks as prime locations for the new building.

Beautiful and historic are meaningless words until they apply to specific houses and a neighborhood you are in danger of losing.

It's as if some Machiavellian overlord had said, "Let's tear this burg's heart out. Get 'em where they live."

If an enemy wanted to drop a bomb on Cape Girardeau in a spot whose destruction would cause the greatest psychological devastation, this would be a prime target. DC says the mall would be No. 1.

Part of it's tied to memories. My granny lived in a house on one corner of one of the blocks, my elementary school principal next door. Around on the other side lives a woman DC and I have known since childhood. Other people can go on around the block and make their own connections, compile their own histories.

Roaming the country in my 20s and 30s, I lived many places that did not feel like communities. I discovered that a community is only a community if people feel connected to the very ground they live on and to each other.

That connection comes from a bond felt with your neighbors, one that says you care about what happens here. Because what happens to you happens to me.

In Cape Girardeau, this bond dates to the days when Don Louis Lorimier established a trading post a block from our house. That was 1793.

He married an Indian woman named Charlotte and kept the peace between the tribes and the European settlers streaming in.

When I was younger, I used to ride my bicycle to Old Lorimier Cemetery and read the gravestones of ancestors. Not biological ancestors, but the people who, like me, chose this place to live.

I'd always stop at the plot of the Giboney family, one of the town's oldest clans. There is tombstone after tombstone of Giboney children who died one by one in the early 1820s, '30s and '40s from sicknesses, presumably. The tombstones of eight or nine children, I can't remember, and a wife in her prime. A tragedy too hard to understand.

Inevitably I walked on to my favorite tree, an ancient oak whose massive trunk looks like eight or nine individual trees that decided to grow together. I didn't know why, but it always made me feel better to stay by this tree awhile.

So here we are, their spiritual descendants, individuals who have decided to grow together. But sometimes we disagree about what "grow" means.

To me it can't mean scraping the foundations of our history out of the ground, cutting ourselves off at our roots.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff wri ter for the Southeast Missourian.