What it means to be from Rhode Island
Always comparing, never comparable.
On this day 20 or so years ago, I paid a visit to the Pawtucket Public Library. Instead of coming home with an armful of books, I found a locked door and a sign with a piece of information I’ve delighted in sharing ever since: CLOSED, IN OBSERVANCE OF RHODE ISLAND INDEPENDENCE DAY.
I remember this with such certainty because today, May 4, the day Rhode Island declared freedom from Great Britain in 1776, also happens to be my birthday. It feels cozy, in a way, to share something so significant with a place I love so much.
This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about growing up in Pawtucket, and specifically all the time I spent at my grandparents’ house on West Avenue. That house was a daycare, a summer camp, and the venue for our extended family’s deliciously chaotic holidays. Mémère would bake whoopie pies no one else in the family has been able to replicate since. On sunny days, Pépère would sometimes take us on walks to pick up the Pawtucket Times and a loaf of bread from the corner store. Tiny adventures I treasure still.
Today I’m sharing something I wrote in their house at the end of 2020. It was empty then, and the safest place for me to quarantine when I tested positive for COVID. With unfettered access to the once-forbidden closets and cupboards and dresser drawers, memories flooded back.
The house was built in 1910 and my grandfather moved in when he returned from WWII. My mother and her siblings all grew up there, and the house was filled with at least four generations of family photos, letters, newspaper clippings—hints of how life has changed in Pawtucket over the last century.
The contents of the house had remained largely the same since the days I used to curl up in the corner of the stairwell to devour yet another volume of Nancy Drew, save for the evidence of an aging grandparent—a wheelchair, a walker, a stairlift. How can a place—a house, a city, a state—change so much and yet so little, I wondered. How can it shape you, and how can you shape it? How does it change after you’ve left, when it’s no longer yours? Where is the soul of a place contained?
Until next time,
Kassondra Cloos
Editor-in-Chief
To be from Rhode Island
by Kassondra Cloos
To be from Rhode Island is to be in a constant state of comparison. It is to be keenly aware that you are lacking, needing, wanting, for more space, more excitement, more recognition, more anything. It’s to be overlooked as Massachusetts’s little sister, to be sandwiched between New York and Connecticut, to be known not for the things within your borders but for the great blue body of water off the coast of it. It’s longing to belong, desperate to be needed, to be understood, to be noticed.
It is to be mistaken as a part of someone else’s whole (“Oh! I know Rhode Island! That’s that island off the coast of New York, right?”). To wonder how you learned the rest of the world by building it around your tiny corner of the map, while everyone else seems to have learned of you only in passing, if at all, knowing you as little more than the smallest part of the whole you shared.
To be from Rhode Island is to measure the seasons in clambakes, hayrides, snowmen, and showers. It’s to be constantly shouting, waving, screaming, “We are more than a measuring stick for your hurricanes!” It is to be constantly seeking attention. We are, simultaneously, the silent genius, the class clown desperate for laughs, the invisible average.
To be from Rhode Island is to be proud of any mention of our state’s name, good or bad, that makes it into a textbook, a news bulletin, a conversation overheard at an airport. It is to watch every movie where a recognizable part of the state makes an appearance, and it is to know someone who knows someone who knows the guy whose house they filmed in.
It is also to be embarrassed of our relative obscurity, to try to make it “out” by being known within the state’s borders by being known beyond them. To succeed, to make it, is for locals to sing your praises: Don’t you know Viola Davis grew up in Central Falls, we tell people. Don’t you know Taylor Swift bought a house in Westerly, we say, when people ask us if Rhode Island is really as small as they think it is.
To be from Rhode Island is to be part of a one-million-person family who will tell their friends and neighbors and strangers, loudly, how they’re so proud of you and how they’re also associated with your success. By the nature of having grown up within the same 1,200 square miles, they contributed grandly to who you have become, whether you’re aware of it or not.
Rhode Island is the house where your great-great grandmother used to live, the mill that started it all, the former nursing home that was formerly your father’s first job. It’s accidentally pulling a carton of coffee milk out of the crate in first grade, meaning to grab chocolate; going to a birthday party and sneaking a peek into a white cardboard box, hoping for cupcakes, and instead finding saucy red squares of bakery pizza, stacked three deep between greasy sheets of plastic.
To grow up here is to be told tall tales of the Blizzard of ’78, to have parents who tire of your “long distance” relationship with a boy in your high school who lives 30 minutes away, to shout about how you hate this tiny place! with the kind of passion that can only be fueled by love. It’s to wonder if that smallness is maybe the best thing, the most special bit, after all.
Rhode Island is a bible of old stories about the way things used to be. It’s a black-and-white photograph, it’s decades compressed into one another, it’s directions based on landmarks that no longer exist. This isn’t a D’Angelos, this is where a Dunkin’ Donuts used to be. This isn’t the fancy new Providence River Pedestrian Bridge, it’s simply where the interstate once ran.
Turn left at the Subway that used to be your great-grandfather’s pharmacy, a shop that closed probably decades before you were born. Turn right at the old fruit stand, which never had a name to you, which has been a dry cleaner’s for at least the last 15 years. Turn not onto Smith Street, but just after you pass La Salle Bakery, where you and Dad would sometimes pick up a loaf of bread after school.
Rhode Island is a collection of present-tense cities that thrive on the past like this, even though the state motto, “Hope,” is focused on the future. We’re always looking back, thinking back, living back. Wishing back, back to the way it all used to be, where our memories are safe from the strife that must have existed then, too.
I used to think all this talk about the shops that had closed or the glory days of Rocky Point was boring, bitterness. Misplaced or wasted passion. But now I understand: Talking about the way things were is a way of keeping them alive.
Maybe that’s what a place is made of, what it means to have a sense of somewhere. It’s not how a street looks, or who’s living there, or which types of businesses now inhabit the old storefronts. It’s an awareness of the past, a sense of all the footsteps that have come before you, that have traversed the same sidewalks, paced the same wooden floors, climbed the same creaky set of stairs.
A sense of place is a sense of the way the tides of history have swirled around you, compressing generations of life into one moment of now. And it’s a sense of placing yourself in it, in time, understanding just a tiny fraction of how you are the way you are, all because of where you’ve come from.
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Quite wonderful, this Downcity Ink.