The store beneath is a kind of junk store — the windows are filled with plastic dolls, a wooden chair draped with beads and a large Confederate flag … - Lyz Lenz

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The store beneath is a kind of junk store — the windows are filled with plastic dolls, a wooden chair draped with beads and a large Confederate flag hanging in the background. Illinois, billed “the Land of Lincoln,” was firmly in the Union during the Civil War. That flag is not there for even superficial history reasons. It’s there as a symbol.

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About Lyz Lenz

Lyz Lenz (born 1982) is an American author and editor. She was previously a columnist at The Cedar Rapids Gazette and served as managing editor of The Rumpus. She is the author of God Land and Belabored. Lenz moved from Vermillion, South Dakota to Minneapolis, Minnesota while in high school and graduated from Eden Prairie High School. She has an undergraduate degree from Gustavus Adolphus College. Lenz belonged to Evangelical churches but came into conflict with their orthodoxies including on the role of women in the church and the exclusion of gay and lesbian people.

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Additional quotes by Lyz Lenz

One year after I moved out of my house and my marriage, I wrote an essay for Glamour titled “I’m a Great Cook. Now That I’m Divorced, I’m Never Making Dinner for a Man Again.” The article outlined how for eleven years I’d cooked meals for my husband and then for our children. I had liked cooking. I loved it even. I thought of food as my offerings of love. But as our marriage dragged on, cooking became less of a joy and more of an obligation. When my marriage ended, I stopped cooking. “I stopped cooking because I wanted to feel as unencumbered as man walking through the door of his home with the expectation that something had been done for him,” I wrote. “I wanted to be free of cutting coupons and rolling dough and worrying about dinner times and feeding. I wanted to rest.

Why did I stay in churches that I didn’t like for so long? Why did any of us? Because we loved the people there, and we had been taught God was big enough for all of us, and we had the audacity to take those lessons at their word.

In her book Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America, Jennifer Sherman posits that in places lacking resources, morality is social capital. Appearing “good” unlocks jobs and community resources. But morality is determined in a fluid way; it’s just as much about fitting in and looking the part as it is about good behavior. Being white, wearing the right clothes (not too fancy, not too dirty), being male, being married, and having children were all part of the appearance of morality. But it wasn’t just about “good” behavior. John Sadler had stretched the law in an extra-legal way to get around the tax code. But this was looked on as an example of good behavior — he was conning the government after all. This made him smart and quick-witted, a cunning businessman and someone you would respect. Hell, he was a leader in his community.

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