#(this is all a joke from your friendly neighborhood historian)

[msculper]

i think my ideal physical form is just as close to a corpse as i can get. i would’ve done numbers in the 1840s.

[bean-na-farraige-agus-foraoise]

Druids ain’t shit and here’s why.

Straight from the Pond- here’s a lesson from your friendly neighborhood historian.

It’s a long post so the history lesson is under the cut. 

Druidic “history” (or pseudohistory rather) actually begins with early renaissance politics. 

Basically Italy is dominating politics and religion by being able to call back to an ancient history that led directly into the formation of the centralized Catholic church. Surprising nobody who's familiar with European history- the German states want in on that action but they don't really have that direct line linking them to antiquity beyond their conquering by Rome- so, like any good 15th century academics, they create that link by just making shit up. 

So they look back at ancient roman writings, and see mention of druids, and also realize that they actually don't know fuck all about them, there's no records of them beyond a few classical authors- and for the record, classical authors are NOTORIOUSLY unreliable, there are entire graduate level seminars dedicated to teaching people how to read through ancient Roman propaganda, almost every druid I have ever met has taken classical authors at face value, anyway I digress, they just start making up a history of the druids, German lands used to be populated by Celts, and they create these mystical druids who serve as the direct precursor to The Church in these areas, like they forge documents and everything so when Italy goes "oh yeah since when?" they have something to hold up as a "gotcha" - they fashion statues and hide them in crypts as further evidence. It’s wild. 

So, France sees that the German states are becoming more politically popular within the HRE (Holy Roman Empire) because of these druid stories, and so they go "Hey Celts used to live in France too... we should have druids"- and they create druid stories. Scotland at the time is very close with France politically and they go "Hey us too, we're still Celts,” and then it spreads to Wales, and then England. Ireland is mostly staying out of druid nonsense- like in this period of the OG pseudohistories Ireland is like "this is disgusting we don't want druids" so like all the writings in Ireland in this period on druids are like "yeah the Church HATES druids"

Things quiet down for a little bit, because the stories are established, the cards have been played, whatever, but then Neo-Classicism and the Enlightenment- and now suddenly it's cool to have ancient history again - but like... Britain has "we got conquered by Rome" or "hey a few centuries ago people were saying we had druids?”; so naturally the more nationalistic go with druids....which is how we get, Iolo Morganweg.  Iolo's real name is Edward Williams but he insisted on going by his "bardic name"- bc druids.  Williams was a Welsh antiquarian- who is in some scholastic circles considered the father of “modern” druidry.  Williams literally named his son Taliesin after the bardic poet behind the Poems of Taliesin which is frequently in association with the Mabinogi in Brythonic texts. To pull from the wiki on this asshole: 

[he made] claims that ancient Druidic tradition had survived the Roman conquest, the conversion of the populace to Christianity, the persecution of bards under King Edward I, and other adversities. His forgeries develop an elaborate mystical philosophy, which he claimed as a direct continuation of ancient Druidic practice. Williams's reportedly heavy use of laudanum may have been a contributing factor

Yeah.... just... yeah. So not only did he forge like hella documents, which today in the 21st century, over 100 years after he was revealed as a fraud, are still more popular than the originals- but he also is the reason that ogham is like that. Williams created a ‘bardic alphabet’ based on combining Scandinavian runes and extant ogham - we are still wading through his bullshit trying to fix ogham. 

And this brings us to the Celtic Twilight...... 

To quote @liminalblessings​, “And a bunch of noodle fuckers decide "hey, we didn't bastardize the Irish enough for the last however long.... We should do more of that."” But for those of you not familiar with the term, it's a nationalistic pan-Celtic movement that wanted to like, make the Celts in vogue again? but like their idea of the Celts as "noble savage” - because the modern era was scary. At this point, Pan-Celtic Nationalism is starting to rise as pushback against British colonialism in Celtic nations. Unfortunately it's heavily reliant on the Druid myth as like.... A foundational shared cultural history between the surviving Celtic nations. The point largely is, though, "look at us. We should all be sticking together because we're the same / cousins / brothers". Which leads to a L O T of Celtic culture from various countries kind of getting.... molded into one singular idea- which is USUALLY what we think of today when we think of Celts. Basically everything gets branded as Irish because the Irish were “pure” and a “separate racial identity” as opposed to the Scots and Welsh. It took that idea of a pan-Celtic singularity, and then went ham with it mostly on Irish pre-Christian stuff, and as it occurred not too long after Williams’ fuckery, it really cemented those forgeries and psuedohistories in the cultural memory. And Williams wasn’t exposed as a fraud until after the Celtic Twilight had died down.

Now... Yeats, we all know Yeats- some people recommend his writings for learning about the fairies. DO NOT LISTEN TO THOSE PEOPLE. Yeats makes up an entire tree calendar, and also files all Scottish fairy lore under the “Irish” tab because he’s part of the Celtic Twilight and didn’t you know that everything Celtic is actually Irish? Fuck this guy. #yeetyeats

Enter... Robert Graves- destroyer of histories and all around fuckwit. Graves maked up an ENTIRE religious notion around a mother goddess and shit. And like, the irony of that is the people he supposedly went to originally were like lol dude you're a fucking idiot none of this is real. But he published it anyways and of course it got taken seriously. And then there's a lot of reverse etymology at this point which is just.... really bad linguistics. And because of Graves’ white goddess + said bad linguistics by others, you get Danu.(Danu is a whole thing, please shoot me an ask if you want a post about all of that nonsense). 

So.... Gerald Gardener.... to quote @liminalblessings​ again- “didn’t have a direct role in druidism, except he kind of did.”  See, Gardner had a good friend who was hella interested in the Celtic twilight. Said friend was hella inspiried by Gardner's "recreation" of old British trad witch traditions... But he didn't jive with the old British trad witch traditions. HE jived with Irish Druidry. So while Gardner's doing HIS thing, his friend's doing the modern Druid thing- heavily drawing from Gardner's own work but "making it more historically Druid" Except, as you may have picked up- there is no such thing as “historically druid” that can be reconstructed. Basically he can only pull from Williams, but because he had issues with with the old 15th century on stuff, up to the Twilight era (despite those being his sources) so he tries to distance himself from the earlier movements and leans hella heavy into Gardner's work as a result. Which is, if you've ever wondered, why Wicca and Druidry have such incredibly similar ritual structures and beliefs.

SO, this guy starts the Druid Order, decides that he’s gonna like pull his teachings from Williams- but he's also gonna say that Williams has nothing to do with his druidry because y'know, Williams has relatively recently been revealed as a fraud. This guy goes through the grueling process of ripping off his best bud gardner founding Druidry, right. So The Druid Order has this rebranding in 1951, that lauds the “history of the druids” as written by Williams but simultaneously rejects Williams saying “yeah we have nothing whatsoever to do with that guy.” Mix into this narrative, Gardener’s “burning times” bullshit, and now not only do we have mythical pseudohistorical druids, but a rewrite of Williams’ “the druids survived conversion” which then turned into - “The druids were heavily persecuted by the church and survived a horrible burning times but despite this there’s a tradition of continuous druidic belief.” Here begins the bullshit known as “vestiges of pagan thought”- which took actual historians not even a decade to disprove, and yet still circulates in pagan circles, because nobody picks up a fucking book.  Theoretical Folkloric archaeology became very popular at this time, which postulates (incorrectly) that all folk traditions and folklore absolutely stems from Pagan times and is 100% the Christianization of pagan practices and thoughts- which is not at all true. (Not-so-friendly reminder that Eostre? DOESN’T FUCKING EXIST. STOP FALLING FOR A JOKE MADE BY A MONK)

Td;lr so far- the druids went from 

the Catholic clergy before the Catholics existed 

to 

a religious group that survived conversion

to

druids survived an intense and violent persecution 

And now? In this our 21st century? 

Well.... druidic organizations today tend to still push these ahistorical narratives, that buy into the pagan persecution complex.... and several of these organizations also have known racists and terfs on their recommended reading lists. And while some organizations have made attempts to become more historically accurate- but the end result is usually.... bad. It tends to result in them using a source from like 1960 that’s been disproven 1000 times since by other historians to go “look a historian agrees with us!” rather than like... keep up with current research trends and academic standards. Druids also tend to be hostile to the syncretism of the Irish church which is just..... so fucking dumb. Don’t worship gaelic deities if you can’t accept that our lore are Christian texts about pagan beliefs. 

So yeah..... druids ain’t shit and I can prove it historically. I am also more than willing to send anyone links to full length books on the history of druids if you want to learn more. 

[qqueenofhades]

I have a question about your opinion as a historian about how to deal with problematic past. I am French, not American, so not quite as aware of what is happening right now in the US regarding statues as I probably should. My question is the following: many of the politicians who promoted (admittedly white) social equality in France, worked on reforming labor laws, etc, in the 19th / 20th century were certainly not anti-colonialist. How to deal with this "mixed legacy" today? Best wishes to you!

First off, I am honoured that you would ask me this question. Disclaimer, my work in French history is largely focused on the medieval era, rather than modern France, and while I have studied and traveled in France, and read and (adequately?) speak French, I am not French myself. So this should be viewed as the perspective of a friendly and reasonably well-informed outsider, but not somebody from France themselves, and therefore subject to possible errors or otherwise inaccurate statements. But this is my perception as I see it, so hopefully it will be helpful for you.

(By the way if you’re interested, my post on the American statue controversy and the “preserving history!” argument is here. I originally wrote it in 2017, when the subject of removing racist monuments first arose, and then took another look at it in light of recent events and was like “WELP”.)

There’s actually a whole lot to say about the current crisis of public history in a French context, so let me see if I can think where to start. First, my chief impression is that nobody really associates France with its historical empire, the same way everyone still has either a positive or negative impression of the British Empire and its real-world effects. The main international image of France (one carefully cultivated by France itself) is that of the French Revolution: storming the Bastille, guillotining aristocrats, Liberté, égalité, fraternité, a secular republic overcoming old constraints of a hidebound Catholic aristocracy and reinventing itself as a Modern Nation. Of course, less than a generation after the Revolution (and this has always amused/puzzled me) France swung straight back into autocratic expansionist empire under Napoleon, and its colonialism efforts continued vigorously alongside its European counterparts throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century. France has never really reckoned with its colonialist legacy either, not least because of a tendency in French public life for a) strong centralization, and b) a national identity that doesn’t really allow for a hyphen. What I mean by that is that while you can be almost anything before “American,” ie. African-American, Latino-American, Jewish-American, Muslim-American, etc, you are (at least in my experience) expected to only be “French.” There is a strong nationalistic identity primarily fueled by language, values, and lifestyle, and the French view anyone who does not take part in it very dimly. That’s why we have the law banning the burka and arguments that it “inhibits” Muslim women from visually and/or emotionally assimilating into French culture. There is a very strong pressure for centralization and conformity, and that is not flexible.

Additionally, the aforementioned French lifestyle identity involves cafe culture, smoking, and drinking alcohol -- all things that, say, a devout Muslim is unlikely to take part in. The secularism of French political culture is another factor, along with the strict bureaucracy and interventionist government system. France narrowly dodged getting swept up in the right-wing populist craze when it elected Emmanuel Macron over Marine Le Pen (and it’s my impression that the FN still remains relatively popular) but it also has a deep-grained xenophobia. I’m sure you remember “French Spiderman,” the 22-year-old man from Mali who climbed four stories of a building in Paris to rescue a toddler in 2018. He was immediately hailed as a hero and allowed to apply for French citizenship, but critics complained about him arriving in France illegally in the first place, and it happened alongside accelerated efforts to deny asylum seekers, clear out the Calais migrant camp, and otherwise maintain a hostile environment. The terror attacks in France, such as 2015 in Paris and the 2016 Bastille Day attack in Nice, have also stiffened public opinion against any kind of accommodation or consideration of non-French (and by implication, non-white) Frenchpeople. The Académie Française is obviously also a very strong linguistic force (arguably even more so than the English-only movement in America) that excludes people from “pure” French cultural status until they meet its criteria. There really is no French identity or civic pride without the French language, so that is also something to take into consideration.

France also has a strong anti-authority and labor rights movement that America does not have (at least the latter). When I was in France, the joke was about the “annual strike” of students and railway workers, which was happening while I was trying to study, and we saw that with the yellow jacket protests as well. Working-class France is used to making a stink when it feels that it’s being disrespected, and while I can’t comment in detail on how the racial element affects that, I know there has been tension and discontent from working-class, racial-minority neighborhoods in Paris about how they’ve been treated (and during the recent French police brutality protests, the police chief rejected any idea that the police were racist, despite similar deaths in custody of black men including another French Malian, Adama Traoré.) All of this adds up to an atmosphere in which race relations, and their impact on French history, is a very fraught subject in which discussions are likely to get heated (as discussions of race relations with Europeans and white people tend to get, but especially so). The French want to be French, and feel very strongly that everyone else in the country should be French as well, which can encompass a certain race-blindness, but not a cultural toleration. There’s French culture, the end, and there isn’t really an accommodation for hybrid or immigrant French cultures. Once again, this is again my impression and experience.

The blind spot of 19th-century French social reformers to colonialism is not unlike Cold War-era America positioning itself as the guarantor of “freedom and liberation” in the world, while horrendously oppressing its black citizens (which did come in for sustained international criticism at the time). Likewise with the American founding fathers including soaring rhetoric about the freedom and equality of all (white) men in the Constitution, while owning slaves. The efforts of (white) social reformers and political activists have refused to see black and brown people as human, and therefore worthy of meriting the same struggle for liberation, for... well, almost forever, and where those views did change, it had to come about as a process and was almost never there to start with. “Scientific” white supremacy was especially the rage in the nineteenth century, where racist and imperialist European intellectuals enjoyed a never-ending supply of “scientific” literature explaining how black, brown, and other men of color were naturally inferior to white men and they had a “duty” to civilize the helpless people of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and so on, who just couldn’t aspire to do it themselves. (This is where we get the odious “white man’s burden” phrase. How noble of them.) So the nineteenth-century social reformers were, in their minds, just doing what science told them to do; slavery abolitionists and other relief societies for black and brown people were often motivated by deeply racist “assimilationist” ideas about making these poor helpless people “fit” for white civilization, at which point racial prejudice would magically end. This might have been more “benevolent” than outright slave-owning racism, but it was no less damaging and paternalistic.

If you’re interested in reading about French colonialism and postcolonialism from a Black French perspective, I recommend Frantz Fanon (who you may have already heard of) and his 1961 magnum opus The Wretched of the Earth/ Les Damnés de la Terre. (There is also his 1952 work, Black Skin, White Masks.) Fanon was born in Martinique, served in World War II, and was part of the struggle for Algerian liberation from France. He was a highly influential and controversial postcolonial theorist, not least for his belief that decolonialization would never be achieved without violence (which, to say the least, unnerved genteel white society). I feel as if France in general needs to have a process of deep soul-searching about its relationship to race and its own imperial history (French Indochina/Vietnam being another obvious example with recent geopolitical implications), because it’s happy to let Britain take the flak for its unexamined and triumphalist imperial nostalgia. (One may remark that of course France is happy to let Britain make a fool of itself and hope that nobody notices its similar sins....) This is, however, currently unlikely to happen on a broad scale for the social and historical reasons that I discussed above, so I really applaud you for taking the initiative in starting that conversation and reaching out for resources to help you in doing it. Hopefully it will help you put the legacy of these particular social reformers in context and offer you talking points both for what they did well and where their philosophy fell short.

If there does come a point of a heightened racial conversation and reckoning in France (and there have been Black Lives Matter protests there in the last few weeks, so it’s not impossible) I would be curious to see what it looks like. It’s arguably one of the Western countries that has least dealt with its racial issues while making itself into the standard-bearer for secular Western liberalism. France has also enthusiastically joined in the EU, whereas Britain has (rather notoriously....) separated from all that, which makes Britain look provincial and isolated while France can position itself as a global leader with a more internationalist outlook. Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel are currently leading the effort for the $500 billion coronavirus rescue package for the EU, which gives it a sense of statesmanship and stature. It will be interesting to see how that continues to change and develop vis-a-vis race, or if it does.

Thanks so much for such an interesting question, and I hope that helped!

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Graphics by Rachael Dottle

I grew up at the top of a hill on the east bank of a river that burned.1 That determined so much.

My maternal grandparents bought the house where I grew up in 1949. They were the rare Catholics in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, and they lived at the edge of the city, a few blocks away from a Jesuit college and parish. They were entering their 40s, and that they could buy in tony Shaker carried a certain cachet. The city probably wasn’t quite as excited to have them. My paternal grandfather, who was a real estate agent and lived a town over, was sometimes told by sellers in Shaker that they didn’t want their homes shown to any Catholics (like him) or Jews. The city had few black residents then. After one black couple did move to Shaker in the mid-1950s, their newly built home was firebombed in the middle of the night. That determined so much, too.

Parma, a city on the other side of the Cuyahoga River — which bisects Cleveland both geographically and transcendentally — was on the precipice of a wild population sprout in ’49. The city’s neat rows of modest houses still speak to the enthusiasm of its post-war suburban sprawl. In the course of two decades, Parma’s population grew from 30,000 to more than 100,000. It was the butt of Cleveland jokes, though. In a blue-collar part of the country, Parma was almost too blue collar — its flamingos-on-the-lawn, pierogies-in-the-kitchen reputation was so infamously parodied by a local 1960s TV personality that the mayor of Parma called the comedy “a dangerous slur to the community.”

For Cleveland suburbs, Shaker and Parma have little in common other than that, until recently, Democratic presidential candidates could count on their votes. But in 2016, Parma voted for Donald Trump, and Shaker didn’t. To Clevelanders, this split followed a certain logic. Shaker and Parma have long been of different tribes, though the same political party.

The two cities, one racially mixed, the other homogenous, have become my reference point for a cultural fissure in the Democratic Party that gaped open with the election of Trump. White Americans have split politically along class lines, and their alienation from each other following 2016 seems utter and complete. But the split that’s happening isn’t just between residents of rural and urban places. It’s also apparent in some suburbs, among people whose lives aren’t, at least on the surface, all that different from one another’s.

Much of my life since 2016 has been subsumed by politics talk — on podcasts, at parties, in conversations I scribble down in my notebook. Those discussions are often about how Americans find their tribe. Whom you date or befriend might hinge on politics. What city you move to might also, as well as what news you read and what books you take as gospel — whether you take the gospels as gospel matters politically, it turns out.

So, I decided to go home to look at the tribalism of where I’m from. Perhaps familiar ground might lead me down some road of insight. By dumb luck, we’re all born some place, to some kind of people. The choices made for and by us along the way, and the histories we absorb, are what shape our politics. They did in 2016, and they will again in 2020.

On the left, the Ridgewood Inn in Parma’s Polish Village. On the right, Shaker Heights High School’s bleachers.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

We don’t spend much time thinking about the suburbs. That’s sort of the point — they’re purposely and pleasantly boring, a cul-de-sac monolith of culture. But the suburbs also form the worldviews of 175 million Americans. Whom you live next to, where your parents went to school, what store opens down the street — all these small things shape the politics of Americans before they even know what politics are.

In the past few years, the suburbs have also shown themselves to be the heart of the shifting politics of the nation. According to exit polls, Hillary Clinton lost the suburbs to Donald Trump in 2016, continuing a slump for Democrats — Obama lost the suburban vote in 2012 after nabbing it in 2008. But in the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats took back the House on the strength of their showing in suburban districts.

Lots of theories for the changing political proclivities of suburban Americans have been floated, and white Americans are front and center. (White people are the majority in 90 percent of America’s suburban counties.) Class has something to do with it. Over the past few years, college-educated white people have been increasingly more apt to vote for Democrats, while those without a college education skew Republican.

But what do we mean when we talk about “class” and politics? While Trump’s campaign consistently served messages of blue-collar empowerment, the people who voted for him were often quite well-off. According to an analysis of American National Election Studies data, 1 in 5 Trump voters without a college degree had a household income over $100,000.

Our concept of class is far too vaguely defined, and our political discussions of it too two-dimensional. Class means more than how much money you make or whether you went to college. It encompasses your understanding of racial identity — your own and that of others — and your perceptions of history, whether you look favorably or unfavorably on the country’s evolution. When we say “working-class white,” what we actually mean is a set of people whose understandings of politics is rooted in a specific set of values: those of racially homogenous communities who came up in America through middle-class jobs, often unionized ones.

If Democrats lose these voters in 2020 — both white blue-collar workers and their blue-collar-identifying descendants — it might portend a dramatically different party over the next few decades, or even century. When I went back to Ohio, I gleaned that how white people vote has quite a bit to do with their pasts — the formation of political identity comes from experiences, oftentimes inherited ones.

Parma and Shaker Heights lie on opposite sides of Cleveland’s metropolitan area and on opposite sides of a cultural divide. That cultural divide became a political one in 2016.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

Politics are an iteration of ongoing history. So to understand Shaker’s and Parma’s present moment, I went back to the beginning.

Shaker Heights — current population, 28,000 — is named for the Shakers, the celibate Christian sect that settled in what they called “The Valley of God’s Pleasure.” The Shakers rather predictably lost their mojo around the turn of the 20th century because young people kept leaving, rumspringa-style. By 1905, the 1,366 acres of land they had worked found its way into the hands of real estate developers, the Van Sweringen brothers, who bought it for a cool million.

Shaker was to have neighborhood schools, lakes, canoeing, and no undesirables that would bring down home values. Deed restrictions stipulated architectural style, and only four were acceptable: Tudor, Colonial, French provincial and English cottage. (Historian Virginia Dawson has researched the city’s exclusionary real estate tactics extensively, cataloging the stringent regulations of Shaker’s early years.)

It was a rarified, exclusive atmosphere. An early advert talked about “friendly neighbors of our own kind … the peace and beauty and hominess of Shaker Village can never be invaded.”

Early advertisements for housing developments in what would become Parma.

CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER

The crucial Van Sweringen innovation, though, was a railway line that took Shaker residents directly from their suburban homes to downtown Cleveland. “Open rolling country and deep woods lie beyond, yet the Public Square is but 30 minutes away by Shaker Electric Express,” an ad from 1926 read. Shaker was cosseted suburban life done to perfection yet still had access to the cosmopolitanism of Cleveland.

Perhaps that’s why early news and advertisements for the development that would become Parma conjured up visions of Shaker Heights. (Parma was incorporated as a city in 1931 and before that was known as Parma Township.) “In many ways, it will rival the Heights district,” a 1921 newspaper item said of Ridgewood, the brainchild of developer (and Shaker Heights Country Club member) H.A. Stahl. There were artificial lakes, and “many acres are set out in wonderful orchards,” an ad trumpeted. “Children … will grow strong and healthy out in Ridgewood. Three hundred and twenty-five feet above Lake Erie, where the air is pure and fragrant with the perfume of flowers.”

But the West Side development seemed ultimately more intent on attracting a humbler demographic. Stahl’s company promised that “the man of modest income can buy a homesite at the price of an ordinary lot in a manufacturing district and live amid beautiful surroundings.” And indeed, the real Parma boom came after World War II, driven by migration from the Eastern European Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland. As Andy Fedynsky, director emeritus of the Ukrainian Museum-Archives in Cleveland tells it, Tremont’s big Ukrainian Catholic church had purchased a cemetery plot out in the suburb. “People started gravitating to Parma because every time they buried a loved one, they went there,” Fedynsky said. The churches and people kept coming in droves thanks to the 10-minute drive on the highway from Cleveland to Parma.

Parma’s identity has remained remarkably cohesive — 88 percent of its residents are white, and it’s still a community centered around churches and the Eastern European experience. Most of the city’s immigrants are European — 71 percent, according to recent U.S. Census Bureau estimates. Evidence of the city’s ethnic pride is still easy to see — on a recent visit, I spotted the Polish eagle on the side of one building and signs for “Old World Christmas” on street lights.

Shaker, meanwhile, has seen drastic change.

Homes in Shaker Heights.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

Shaker was built for segregation, at the very least the socioeconomic kind. South Woodland, a lovely, tree-lined boulevard, cuts across the belly of the city, dividing it into north and south. The northern reaches are where the real wealth dwelled and still does — it’s where the Van Sweringens built themselves a Tudor fortress. There, larger lots for mansions were built, close to the Shaker Lakes. To the south of South Woodland, there are smaller lots, meant for modest dwellings, including two-family homes.

Neighborhoods on both sides of South Woodland evoked a certain suburban idyll, but the city was far from immune to the racial violence that typified 20th-century America.

The Baileys were a black family that bought a home in Shaker in 1925. Their garage was soon set on fire, and the windows broken. At the time, the Van Sweringens were adding provisions to deeds that stipulated homes couldn’t be sold to people they didn’t approve of. That was mostly code for black and Jewish buyers. The Baileys soon moved back to Cleveland.

Thirty-one years later, in Ludlow, a neighborhood that straddles Cleveland and Shaker, there was another act of racial violence, this one sparking a much different reaction. On Jan. 3, 1956, a bomb destroyed the garage and part of the dining room of John and Dorothy Pegg’s newly built home in Ludlow. The Peggs were black. In the wake of the bombing, a kind of proto-wokeness in the city was born. For decades to come, a part of Shaker’s identity would be its pride in diversity efforts.

Shaker’s Ludlow Community Association formed after the bombing of a black family’s home. The group tried to deter white flight by giving loans to white buyers while also trying to attract black residents to the Ludlow neighborhood that bordered Cleveland.

CLEVELAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY / SHAKER HEIGHTS LIBRARY

After the bombing, Ludlow residents formed the Ludlow Community Association, a group with aims to integrate the neighborhood purposefully. White real estate agents had stopped listing Ludlow homes by the time the community association formed because the neighborhood was integrating, and homeowners feared that a further increase in black residents would decrease property values. Its strategy was to prevent white flight by setting up a mortgage company, offering help to potential white buyers, while still welcoming black residents with open arms. It was a difficult proposition for the time.

Dawson, who lives in Shaker, lauded the careful strategy of the group. “The genius of the way Shaker Heights integrated was that they were trying to attract white liberals who would move in and become cheerleaders for integration,” she told me. To do that, the community association put white residents front and center, she said, even while black residents “were really the leaders.” Today, Ludlow remains an integrated neighborhood.

But elsewhere in Shaker, similar strategies worked with varying degrees of success on the integration front. The Moreland neighborhood had a less proactive neighborhood association, according to Dawson, and its white residents left. Today, it is nearly entirely black.

American suburban life seems to regress to a mean of segregation. A 2011 analysis using Census Bureau data found that a “typical white” American lives in a neighborhood that’s 75 percent white.

Shaker has spent 60 years trying to fight that. And in the process, the city cultivated what might be called, in the parlance of 2019, a woke white demographic. The identity of the city, which once rested on being wealthy and WASP-y, turned unmistakably liberal.

This sort of wokeness has become a trope in today’s Democratic Party, empowering to some, alienating to others. But there’s evidence that white Democrats’ views on race have shifted quite a bit over the past few years. In 2009, according to the Pew Research Center, 50 percent of white Democrats agreed with the idea that the country needs to make changes to give black Americans equal rights to white Americans. By 2017, 80 percent of white Democrats agreed with that position. This shift has come alongside gains for Democrats among white college-educated voters, which seems notable given the change in racial attitudes. Shaker has a lot of that well-educated demographic — 65 percent of the population has a college degree or higher.

Share of the population with a bachelor’s degree or higher, based on the 2013-17 American Community Survey five-year estimate

Bachelor’s Degree or higher Shaker Heights 64.7%

–

Parma 20.7%

–

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

Since I moved away, I haven’t spent much time in the parts of Shaker outside my family orbit — Van Sweringen geography still at work. But on a February afternoon, with time to kill, I took a drive around Moreland and found myself in front of Chelton Park, where I’d played summer-league softball as a kid. Moreland and Ludlow look a decent amount like Parma. Most of the homes around Chelton are doubles. In Ludlow, there’s a mix of the traditional Shaker colonials and Tudors, along with G.I.-era ranch-style homes. As I drove around the area, the street signs switched back and forth from the blue of Cleveland to the white-and-black lettering of Shaker.

Some called the traffic barricades separating Shaker Heights from Cleveland “the Berlin Wall for black people.” Portions of the barricades still stand.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

Down the block from Chelton is Scottsdale Boulevard, the boundary between Shaker and Cleveland. During the 1970s, Shaker set up traffic barriers along Scottsdale in an effort, the city said, to control vehicle flow. To many, though, their purpose seemed clear: “the Berlin Wall for black people.” A couple of barriers are still there.

Most Shaker residents probably don’t like the “build the wall” chant that Trump has popularized, but they built one of their own here, years ago, a reminder that the city’s integration was done on its own particular set of terms; it wasn’t necessarily meant for everyone.

Parma was at the very least honest about its discriminatory practices.

“I do not want Negroes in the City of Parma,” City Council President Kenneth Kuczma said in 1971, garnering Parma all the wrong kinds of attention.

He made the statement at a public meeting on whether a proposed new development should have low-income housing. People were worried that Parmatown Woods would attract, as Mayor John Petruska put it at the meeting, the “entire east side of Cleveland,” a thinly veiled reference to black people. The comments were picked up on local and national TV, and the federal government soon got involved. In 1973, the Justice Department sued Parma, accusing it of engaging “in a pattern and practice of racial discrimination in housing in violation of the Fair Housing Act.”

Parma’s Polish Village.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

In 1970, Parma, a city of 100,000 people, had only 41 black residents, 0.04 percent of its population. The city was eventually found to have systematically discriminated and was mandated by the court to establish its own public housing committee and to advertise the community as welcoming to minority homeowners; unusually, city officials were required to take a course on housing discrimination. (Historian Dennis Keating, emeritus professor of urban studies and law at Cleveland State University, detailed the events surrounding the lawsuit and its fallout in his 1994 book, “The Suburban Racial Dilemma,” which focuses on Cleveland’s suburbs.)

Today, with a population of around 80,000, Parma is 3 percent black.

“There are places I won’t go here because I know I wouldn’t be welcome,” Karyn Dukes, who is black and lives in Parma, told me recently. “There’s a bar at the end of my corner” — I’d seen the Irish bar with cinder-block half-windows when I’d driven up her street — “I’ve never been there.”

Dukes told me that she thinks twice about going into stores with Polish flags or ethnic emblems on them. “You’re scared to because of the rejection of how people will act or treat you when you’re in there,” she said. “I feel like I have to put on this air. I feel like I can’t act like myself — ‘Hi, how are you!’” She put on an exaggerated perky voice.

Polish sweets at Rudy’s Strudel & Bakery in Parma.

CLARE MALONE

A couple of days earlier, I’d gone into one of those businesses to buy Polish jelly doughnuts. The place smelled like pure sugar, advertised polka dancing lessons and had a picture of Joe Biden on the wall. The woman behind the counter was lovely and insisted on giving me free doughnuts when she found out I was visiting from New York. It felt like a Cleveland hug of kindness, the kind of out-of-nowhere warmth I miss on the East Coast. Would Dukes have felt comfortable walking in, I wondered.

Dukes lives in the upstairs of a two-family home with her son, a sweet and gangly preteen. One of the reasons she moved to Parma nearly five years ago was for the schools, the better housing and the chance to be near her mother, who lives in a town not far away. “I think the area that I live in is a prime location,” she said. “There’s a Sam’s Club, a Walmart. There’s a park, bike trails, all that stuff.” Suburban-ideal kind of stuff.

The 2016 election made things hard for Dukes in Parma. She said that Trump yard signs made her feel like people were signaling that they didn’t believe in having people like her there. “I feel like people have had deep feelings about a lot of the issues that he raises, but they didn’t really say anything about it [before] because Cuyahoga County is predominantly a Democratic county.”

Parma has been shaped by the ebbs and flows of American manufacturing and by generations of close-knit communities of Eastern European descent.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

In their book on the 2016 election, “Identity Crisis,” political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreck talk about something not far off from the phenomenon that Dukes describes: “Once Obama was in office, whites with less formal education became better able to connect racial issues to partisan politics.” The Democratic Party, it was becoming clear, was a party for liberal racial policies. That realization coincided with the party’s loss of white people without a college education. In 2008, roughly half of non-college-educated white people identified as Democrats and half as Republican. By 2015, the share that favored the GOP had grown to 57 percent, while the share that favored the Democrats had dropped to 33 percent.

Dukes told me that she is “an empathizer.” I asked what she thought it was that made some people in Parma hostile to people like her. (The politicians I talked to in the area — all white — said racism isn’t a problem anymore in Parma.) “I think because a lot of them were probably immigrants, from immigrant households themselves,” she said. “They probably feel they worked hard to build a community here so how come people of other races can just come in here and benefit from anything they’ve built.”

Dukes said she’s mostly worried about how the environment in Parma will affect her son. “I’m scared to let my son go down the street and play with other kids because I don’t know if their parents are OK with my son being black,” she said. “And that’s the most frightening part.”

“My son loves everyone,” she said. “I don’t want him to see color, but I also have to put the warning out to him.”

Parma Mayor Tim DeGeeter is a Democrat. So is most of the City Council, the city’s state representative and its Cuyahoga County Council member. “Right to Work Is A Lie” is emblazoned on a billboard above the highway near Parma. (Parma has a General Motors plant, and its United Auto Workers chapter is active.) Online, you can watch a 2008 video of a young Barack Obama working the rope line for an adoring crowd at one of Parma City School District’s high schools; a 2012 clip shows Bill Clinton and Bruce Springsteen rallying a Parma crowd in support of Obama.

Hillary Clinton footage?

“Their campaign didn’t focus on places like Parma,” DeGeeter told me, sitting next to Mickey Vittardi, the head of the city’s Democratic Party. The three of us were discussing which, if any, national Democrats could win the city back after 2016. Parma Democrats, DeGeeter said, were Reagan Democrats: “You know who plays best here — Joe Biden.”

Parma’s Democratic identity is a union identity. Its political history is a union town’s political history. That’s in part because the ebbs and flows of American manufacturing figure heavily into Parma’s well-being as a city. DeGeeter said that when GM announced the closure of a plant in Lordstown, Ohio, “we for sure got on the phone and talked to them.” What would happen if the GM plant in Parma closed, I asked. “I wouldn’t want to think about it,” the mayor said.

The Clinton campaign did send Biden to Parma in 2016, and he returned on a midterm swing through the area in 2018. The former vice president likes to commune with the blue-collar union demographic by talking about Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he was born. Despite a national party that’s heavily flirting with left progressivism, Vittardi said that he was hopeful the Democratic presidential primary would winnow the field to a more moderate candidate. “My friends that I grew up with are strong Democrats, but they’re tired of our party sliding so far to the left,” he said.

In recent years, Parma has tried to court new residents with its affordable housing and cohesive sense of identity.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

While Parma’s Democratic identity comes from union politics, its cultural identity is probably best described as “white ethnic.” Because of that, it’s a place that’s well aware of Cleveland’s traditional ethnic geography. “So you’re Irish, what are you doing on the east side?” one person asked me a few minutes into a casual conversation, after he’d found out my last name and that I’d grown up across the river.

DeGeeter told me that the city’s Polish Village, paczki-laden Fat Tuesday celebrations and Ukrainian parades and festivals were real selling points for Parma. Young people, he told me, were eager to move to a community with cheap housing and a cohesive sense of identity.

“People work hard, play hard, want their kids to do better than they did, want their kids to go to college at the Kent States, the Bowling Greens, and be able to afford to go on vacation to Myrtle Beach and Hilton Head,” he said. And they want their politicians to confine themselves to kitchen table issues.

A couple of nights later, I was due in Parma for the city’s local Democratic Party meeting. My usual route west from Shaker takes me by Lake Erie, which I don’t just love for the blue haze it gets in summer or how the spray freezes into icicles in the winter. It’s a useful beauty — you could drink all 127 trillion gallons of fresh water if you needed to. But the route to Parma skirts inland, passing over the industrial heart of Cleveland, where belching towers of smoke sometimes take on the same pearlescent glow of clouds at sunset and shoot ribbons of flame into the night sky. It’s eerily, hellaciously captivating, a reminder, just like the lake, of what made the region. Someone recently said to me, “Who wants to read about Ohio? It’s not even beautiful.” This is just to say, of course it is. Some people just don’t know how to look. And if there is one thing I learned growing up in Ohio and then leaving it, it’s that people dismiss the place. They think it’s the past.

Bill Clinton visited Parma Pierogies Restaurant during his 1992 presidential campaign.

Joe Sohm / Visions of America / UIG via Getty Images

The party meeting was in a VFW hall tucked into a residential neighborhood. I arrived halfway through, and one official had already left for the Cavs game. The small crowd — all white — sipped beer and chatted. Jeff Crossman, who represents Parma in the Ohio House, nursed a beer and told me about a call that he’d gotten a couple of days after his November 2018 victory: “It was [Sen.] Sherrod Brown, and he had called to congratulate me. And we were talking about the [2020] general, and I told him how concerned I was that the national party narrative was hurting us in places like Ohio.” Candidates like Bernie Sanders, Crossman told me, ran the risk of “overpromising and underdelivering.” Ohioans probably weren’t going to go for “Medicare-for-all,” he said. “I don’t know that you can promise free tuition and free health care — it’s not free, first of all,” he said. “There’s a cost somewhere along the line. And I think people in Ohio are smart enough to know that. We’re very pragmatic.”

The break over, Ryan Puente, the soft-spoken, baby-faced executive director of the Cuyahoga County Democrats, got up to brief the crowd on November’s election. The performance of Ohio Democrats has been disappointing over the past couple of cycles, and Puente seemed well aware that his job was to boost morale by putting a spin on the numbers. “Is Ohio a red state?” he asked. “The short answer is ‘no.’”

A lot of that optimism about the competitiveness of the state centered on Brown’s performance. Puente was at particular pains to emphasize the importance of blue-collar suburbs like Parma that might be moving away from the Democratic Party. In Cuyahoga County, he noted, Brown outperformed Democratic gubernatorial nominee Richard Cordray, who lost his race to Republican Mike DeWine, by around 26,000 votes. Puente said that one way to keep Ohio competitive would be to bring all the people who had voted Democratic in the Senate election and Republican in the gubernatorial election back into the fold.

He wrapped up. Were there any questions?

A man wanted to know what to do about Republicans who kept tearing down yard signs by the UAW.

On the left, a flag supporting President Trump flies in Parma. On the right, a sticker in Shaker Heights protests the killing of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old who was fatally shot by a Cleveland police officer in 2014.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

Given FiveThirtyEight’s predilections, I suppose the most pressing question at hand is whether the Democrats can re-unite the political interests of Parma and Shaker in 2020. Can they knit two different tribes back into a single cloth? Will the primary produce the moderate of Parma’s dreams who also appeals to the sensibilities of Shaker’s liberals? That’s what people like to talk your ear off about.

In some ways, though, this near-term political dilemma is far from the only interesting one — what comes after 2020 matters just as much. The realignment of white America’s politics along class lines is likely to continue to define our partisanship.

How that will play out in the culture is an unknown. White Shakerites live in a racially mixed city, a relative rarity in American life. But there is an alliance forming in the Democratic Party between minorities — who are estimated to become the majority in the U.S. by 2045 — and another group of college-educated white people, those who say they share a race-conscious worldview but who don’t live in the same cities as minorities or send their children to the same schools. What that portends for our politics after the upheaval of the Trump era isn’t entirely clear.

Already, that alliance can be tense, particularly on issues where politics are personal. In Shaker, for instance, the schools are ostensibly integrated, but some people feel black students have limited academic opportunities compared with white students.

“There are three Shakers,” Kevin Lowery, the current co-president of the Ludlow Community Association, told me recently. Lowery is black and the father of two children in Shaker’s public schools. He thinks the city isn’t doing enough to grapple with its inherent disparities. “You have your upper-class, elitist Shaker, you have your middle-class Shaker — and those groups have taken ownership of the city,” he said. “Then you have the third group of students that are lower middle class.” Many of those students are black, and in Lowery’s view, they’re treated differently by the city schools. The white parents “have their students placed in upper-level classes whether they can do the work or not,” he said. “But the African American parents and students are steered away.”

Shaker Heights has a diverse school system, but some people have questioned whether white and black students have the same educational opportunities.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

When I was in Shaker’s public schools, we all had to attend programming done by the Student Group on Race Relations to talk openly about our inherent biases, although our cafeteria, like so many others, was racially segregated. I was one of two white girls on the middle-school basketball team, but when I got to high school, I switched to the swim team, which was mostly white. Well-intentioned institutional forces were everywhere, pushing us to integrate, but as humans tend to do, a lot of us settled into what seemed like the most familiar territory.

And Shaker seems less preoccupied these days with proactively implementing pro-integration housing policies. The last loan-giving housing integration group in the city, The Fund for the Future of Shaker Heights, dissolved in 2012, handing over its funds to the Shaker Heights Development Corp. It was the end of a grand social experiment in housing integration. Mayor David Weiss told me that the transition to a focus on business development by no means marks an end to Shaker’s efforts to maintain a racially balanced city. “Inclusion is part of our identity and what we bring, part of who we are and part of what makes us different than other communities,” he said. (Full disclosure: My brother is a member of the Shaker Heights City Council.)

I still wonder if Shaker is special, though, or whether one day it too will regress to the American mean of segregation.

And then what? What does it mean to be politically allied with people you don’t live with? Perhaps Parma gives a glimpse of what happens when that distance becomes too much for a political alliance to bear.

Democrats have started attracting more white, college-educated Americans. Will that always be the case? A few months ago, I was writing a story about California, a state that’s so robustly Democratic that its politics are beginning to divide along class lines, as manifested in debates over housing and gentrification. Justin Garosi, who works in the Legislative Analyst’s Office there, told me that a lot of political conflicts in the state “aren’t so much left versus right as pro-development versus anti-development.”

What else could divide Americans in a future class-based political paradigm?

I’m not entirely sure, but it makes me wonder what it will mean, 10 or 20 years down the line, to have grown up at the top of a hill on the east bank of a river that burned.

[mystery-moose]

FIC: Angus McDonald and the Flight of the Flying V (6/?)

[AO3 link]

They’ve come a long way, but even ten years after the world was saved, they’re still not quite where they should be. A whim, a missing painting, and a handful of near-death experiences help a flip wizard and his apprentice bridge the gap.

Taako does his best. Angus takes some risks. Introductions are made, bonds are tested, and lessons are learned — better late than never.

Taako was a real asshole sometimes. (Okay, most times.) It was a part of his personality he had no intention of ever fully excising. You go for the goof, you commit to the bit, and if some people can't take a joke, that's their problem. He knew Angus was fully aware of this, so Taako wasn't bothered when he didn't speak to him for the next few blocks. He simply twirled his umbrella and followed along quietly to wherever it was they were going.

He didn't have to be a detective to figure it out; the southern edge of Neverwinter butted up against the World's Teeth, the mountains separating the northern and southern halves of Faerun. They were heading towards those mountains along the main thoroughfare, and when the train station came into view, Angus turned to him and smiled.

"Feel like a day trip to Rockport?" he asked.

Taako shouldered his umbrella and grinned. "Why not?"

Getting tickets seemed easier these days — there were two larger trains on parallel tracks, and they operated in sync with each other. By the time they finished paying and stepped out onto the platform, the Rockport Limited was pulling into the station. Angus was a little disappointed ("I hoped you'd get to see the Neverwinter Express, it's totally different.") but Taako was happy to bask in the nostalgia of one of his more memorable escapades.

The train itself was new, since the Reclaimers had trashed the last one pretty thoroughly, but it was largely the same. Fancy gilded exterior, very ornate, with lots of gold and bronze, and an equally plush interior, full of wood and silk and velvet. The train had been Rockport's baby, Angus explained — they'd been the ones to spearhead the tunneling operation, and it was the sole thing they could lord over Neverwinter — so they'd spared no expense in its reconstruction. The only difference Taako noticed was the lack of the empty archway in the dining car. Guess after Jenkins killed someone with it, they reconsidered the whole port-wand pleasure-room thing.

Their conductor was a friendly halfling, cheerful and pleasant and totally boring. No fun goofs to be had at his expense. Angus must have noticed Taako pouting after the halfling led them to their table in the dining car, because he snorted under his breath.

"Sorry you don't get to be mercilessly cruel to someone this trip," he said after the conductor was out of earshot.

"Just nostalgic, is all," Taako said, glancing out the window as the train began to move. "'Sides, not like Jenkins didn't have it coming."

"You didn't know that at the time."

"I had a hunch." Taako tapped his temple. "Elven intuition. You wouldn't understand, being human and all."

Angus smirked. "Uh-huh."

"You wanna play keep away with your notebook for old time's sake?"

"No, I'm good."

As their waiter approached with two full trays of goodies in his hands, Taako nearly did a double-take; he was an absolutely gorgeous dark elf, broad shouldered and built like a house with luscious Fabio-esque hair. He smiled and offered them their choice. Angus took a muffin and coffee, plus a newspaper. Taako took a blueberry scone and a cup of tea. The waiter poured his tea, smiled again, and then took the two trays and headed down the car to another occupied table at the far end. Taako leaned out and watched him walk away. When he settled back into his seat, Angus was shaking his head.

"What? I'm married, I'm not dead."

"Gross, sir."

"Do I have to bring up how you were looking at Silvia? Oh, I'm sorry." He leaned forward. "Lieutenant?"

Angus' grin disappeared and he turned his attention to the newspaper. Taako grinned and took a bite of his scone.

"Y'know," he said with his mouth full, "that sorta dom-sub stuff ain't really my bag, but you chase your bliss, Ango."

"I'm not listening," Angus said in a sing-song voice.

"Right. I'll leave you to your paper. I won't say another word about Silvia." Taako leaned in an stage-whispered, "Miss Hayden, if you're nasty."

Angus rolled up his newspaper and smacked Taako upside the head with it. He started laughing again, and Angus blew out the exasperated sigh he used when he wanted to stifle his own laughter.

The journey was thoroughly uneventful. After they'd taken lunch (and Taako had asked the waiter to bring him a hot towel just to watch him leave a couple more times) they'd retired to the sleeper car. Taako had dozed lazily while Angus read the paper, then they'd played a game of cards where they both cheated mercilessly, and after a few hours, they pulled into Rockport.

Last time, Taako had killed a weird crab monster, stolen a bunch of shit he shouldn't have, thrown a serial killer off the back of a runaway train (well, that was Magnus, but he'd been present for it) and then saved hundreds of people by teleporting said train into said serial killer's private garden. It was wicked awesome.

This trip was pretty good too, though.

Rockport was a fishing and farming town, largely, and that much hadn't changed; it still smelled like fish when the wind blew from the west, and like flowers when it blew from the east. The ticket seller at this end was still the spitting image of Tom Bodett, though a fair bit older than when Taako saw him last. He probably recognized Taako, too, considering how he turned on his heel and walked away the moment he saw him.

It wasn't nearly the size of Neverwinter, but Rockport still qualified as a bona fide city — there were wagons traveling up and down the white cobblestone roads, many pulling cargo trailers full of crates. Stalls and small markets were set up all along the main road from the train station toward the city center, hawking everything Rockport was famous for, which was mostly beef pasties, fish and chips, or bouquets of lupines. Not so many souvenirs of the Rockport Limited anymore, Taako noted. Made sense; if Neverwinter had built their own, it couldn't be that special.

Angus led them off the main road into a narrower side street. Taako narrowly avoided a puddle as he stepped alongside Angus.

"So who are we visiting in Rockport?" he asked.

"There's an artist here," Angus explained, adjusting his glasses as he walked. "He's sort of a historian. Rocco, the owner of that curio shop? They introduced us."

"And this artiste will know... what?"

"Well, the curator gave me the broad strokes—"

"Nice."

Angus rolled his eyes. "—but after talking with Rocco, I'm sure this wasn't about the money. I want to learn more about this painting, and about who painted it."

"What's it even a picture of?" Taako asked, realizing he didn't know the first thing about what they were doing.

"It's a flock of birds flying above the Sword Coast. They say it's the pinnacle of the proto-naturalist movement in the art world."

"'They' being stuffy old professors and ultra-nerds."

Angus opened his mouth, then closed it and shrugged. "Yeah, basically."

"And it's worth a lot?"

He nodded enthusiastically. "Shyeah!"

"How much?"

"A lot."

"We talkin' six digits? Seven?"

Angus hesitated, like he didn't want to say it out loud. "More like eight or nine."

Taako stumbled a bit and caught himself with his umbrella. "Pumpkin?"

"Yes, sir?"

"That's a lot."

"Yes, sir."

While Taako's mind reeled at the amount given (and idly fantasized about how he'd waste it) he followed Angus down the road a few more blocks to a shabbier, dingier part of Rockport. A place where the roads had a few more potholes, the wagons were fewer and farther between, and if anyone bothered to clean the streets, they did it a lot less frequently. Not quite a slum — Taako knew slums — but certainly less well-to-do than anywhere they'd been today. Hell, he was pretty sure that shady curio shop was in a better neighborhood.

Angus stopped in front of a four-story apartment building. There were no wagons on the road, no one walking the streets. Taako suddenly felt very alone, isolated, like there was no one but him and Angus on the whole block.

"Your fancypants art historian lives here?" he asked, glancing around.

"Yep." Angus started up the stone steps. "I think he got caught up in some scandal, years ago. Kicked out of the university."

"No shit."

"Pretty sure he helps Rocco forge the occasional painting," Angus said idly, opening the door. "Or at least do some clean-up work if they're damaged. Fetches a better price that way."

The place was empty, no one in sight. There was a small foyer with doors on either side, a short hallway leading deeper into the building, and a stairway leading up. Angus led the way upstairs. Taako kept glancing around. He heard the occasional signs of life, but they all seemed distant. Nothing sounded close by. It made him nervous. Brought back memories of his time on the lam, after Glamour Springs, when it seemed like even silence and solitude were out to get him.

They walked up four more flights of stairs, and Taako was about to start complaining about it when Angus stepped in front of a door at the top.

"This guy might be a bit... nervy," Angus said diplomatically. "Try to go easy on him, okay? I really need his help."

Taako straightened his back, crossed his heart, and held up two fingers.

Angus stared at him for a moment, then shrugged and knocked on the door.

It slowly swung open.

Angus' eyes widened. He looked at Taako. Taako looked at him, then gestured at the door. Angus held his hands up like how should I know?

With a gentle push, Angus opened the door. "Uh, Mr. Wendell? Sir?"

The apartment was a mess. It was hard for Taako to tell how much of it was always like that. There were paintings propped up along every wall, four or five deep in some places, and paint cans and palettes strewn everywhere. Drop cloths lay in a haphazard pattern on the floor, though paint had still spattered onto some exposed hardwood. A number of easels, one folded up and tipped onto its side, lined the near wall, opposite the windows. There were old takeout boxes on the small kitchen counter to the left, dirty plates on a tiny table to the right, and in the corner, a large trash bag filled with what looked like stale popcorn. It really made Taako feel a lot better about the state of his own home.

Angus walked in, examining the place intensely. Taako took the time to check himself out in a stand-up mirror on the far wall. As he stepped towards it, his nose wrinkled.

"You smell that?" he asked, sniffing the air.

Angus didn't answer. Taako sniffed again. It smelled like something burning. Or... not burning. Charring? Like meat seared too long.

"Taako."

He turned around. Angus was staring at a space beyond the kitchen counter. Taako stepped closer and followed his gaze. An old human man, bald with a grey beard and spots on his forehead, lay face down on the floor. A pool of red surrounded his head.

Oh, good.

"That's not paint, is it."

Angus reached into his jacket and drew his wand. A new one, Taako noticed — fine grained wood, with a longer handle built for a duelist's grip. Nice.

Wait. He sniffed again. Is it wood? Charcoal? Or... is it even a smell?

Taako looked down. Something wasn't right. He was definitely picking up something, and if it wasn't a smell... he reached up, tapped his temple, and cast True Sight.

The ring appeared immediately, a series of invisible, glowing runes stretching from the door to the far wall and back again. Like a summoning circle, or a—

Angus stepped forward, towards the body. Taako's eyes widened as Angus stepped onto the runes.

"Don't!"

Too late. Taako threw himself forward, tackled Angus to the floor next to the corpse, and popped his umbrella. The space behind him flashed and flared as the air itself caught fire. There was a sudden breeze, like an inhale, as the oxygen in the room fed the blaze.

Taako rolled over. His boots were on fire. He kicked at the flames angrily — he loved those fucking boots, god damn it — before Angus cast a light ice spell over them. The boy pushed himself to his feet, eyes wide and hand up to shield them from the waves of heat.

That incantation must have been some serious shit, because the fire wasn't going out. It was getting bigger, growing hotter with every passing second. The drop cloths were already ash, the hardwood floor was charring to black, flames were licking up the walls and flowing across the ceiling, and everything in the apartment that was combustible (which was everything) was catching fast.

Taako held up his umbrella and fired a Ray of Frost at the inferno. It did about as much as good as spitting into it. He swung it from side to side and tried Ice Storm. It melted before it even fully formed.

"We gotta go!" Angus shouted, glancing around. "Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go—"

"Go where?!" Taako shouted back, waving his hand towards the fiery expanse between them and the door.

Angus didn't answer. He had already found their exit. He ran past the kitchen counter, stumbled over an empty paint can, and made it to a window. He tried to open it, straining against the jam, then looked down.

"It's painted shut!" he exclaimed.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," Taako cursed, shoving him aside. He raised his umbrella and fired a spell which blew out the window and most of the wall with it. He turned to Angus and grabbed his hand, and he didn't have to say a word — they both jumped.

Taako popped his umbrella again, and the Featherfall enchantment kicked in immediately. He and Angus floated gently to the ground. The air cleared and the heat faded as they fell, but Taako could still feel it like a forest fire at his back.

As soon as they touched down, Angus turned around and looked up. The fire was spreading fast, already licking past the top of the hole Taako had created.

"Is anyone else in there?" he asked.

"Nah, don't think so," Taako said, shaking his head. Then he looked at Angus, who was starting for the steps. "If you think you're going back in there—"

Angus spun on his heel. "We can't just leave!"

"So call the fucking fire brigade, dingus!" Taako yelled, throwing his arms up.

Angus clenched his jaw. He held his wand straight up and, with a fairly intense use of Prestidigitation, fired a bright, screaming flare high into the sky. Taako stared up at the fire, at the holes it was burning into the roof, at the pillar of heavy black smoke rising into the sky, and scowled.

It had been such a nice day, too.