I was raised in the former Queen Slipper City, the northeastern haven of shoe mills, the city that Andre Dubus III, in his memoir Townie, described as “a town of boarded-up buildings, the parking lots overgrown with weeds and strewn with trash,” (Dubus 9). It is a fact that I would not be the same individual or student if I had been anywhere else. But the Haverhill, Massachusetts I know is worlds apart from the rough 1970’s city Dubus recreates. For one, Dubus grew up during Haverhill’s “urban renewal,” the Haverhill community’s attempt to clean-up the city and bring life back to the desolate scape that Dubus observed. Yet Dubus was still stuck in that broken city that urban renewal sought to fix. Fatherless and free from the authority that …show more content…
When writing his memoir, it may have been difficult to hide some facts from the reader for later. At some points it seems like Dubus does not care about this at all, as he bluntly and almost solemnly informs the reader of the fates of some unfortunate individuals as soon as they are introduced. But what Dubus may have been unable to to prevent was the foreshadowing of his emotions, showing the reader where his mind was headed before the Andre he wrote about had even come close to it. An example of this, although not in Haverhill, happens when Dubus describes his his first of many childhood homes up in New Hampshire, the last place his mother and father shared. In his initial description, when no separation had occurred, Dubus sounds jubilant. The house, surrounded by pine trees and open fields, is where Dubus described as a place where his family “felt rich; we had all that land to play on, we had had that big old house - its dark inviting rooms, its fireplaces, its fading wallpaper and floorboards fastened with square cut nails from before the Civil War,” (Dubus 17). But, when the time comes of his parents’ divorce and his father’s departure the description of the same place is much different. Dubus simply says that “there was a glint of frost on the gravel driveway and our car, the old Lancer… The house was surrounded by tall pines and it was too …show more content…
From the beginning I was taught that Haverhill was a city that fell from grace, yet it was so painfully obvious in Dubus’s time that it need not be said. It lost its place in the world when the loss of the shoe industry left it crippled in the early twentieth century, and to fill that void, drugs and violence stepped in and dominated. In Andre’s time the city was still clinging to the reputation it had lost. But now Haverhill is labeled with the reputation given by people who came up in the city’s dark time, Dubus’s time. I have witnessed the entirety of the city ridiculed with insults like Andover students appearing dressed in trash bags to sporting events to call us “white trash.” But the people who say such things do not see the present. They, like Townie, are made to look only at the past. Haverhill somehow changed doing exactly what it did in Dubus’s time: clinging to that reputation. Now in Haverhill, artistic shoes dot street corners and mill buildings being renovated show the residents Haverhill’s past, but also its future. The city’s incumbent mayor has a slogan, “Haverhill is on the move!” Those words are far more true today than they were in the 1970’s. Andre Dubus III grew in a false period of change when Haverhill was as stagnant as ever, a time labeled “urban renewal.” But by reading Townie and taking a look into Dubus’s life, I can say confidently that the city he and I both share is