Ohio

Ohio links Austin’s childhood between Toledo and Cleveland to an adult understanding of how race shapes safety and belonging. The state is not presented as a single, uniform place: her home setting and her summers with her mother offered sharply different experiences, while white rural Ohio later became part of the landscape she feared her father had to cross for work.

Toledo and the childhood home

Austin describes growing up in a family-friendly, middle-class neighborhood where the population was mostly white but not exclusively so. Her childhood account places that home in Toledo, and contrasts its familiar racial setting with the Black community she encountered during summers in Cleveland. Ohio thus grounds a story that is neither framed as an experience of the Deep South nor as one of extreme poverty or wealth; the ordinary character of the surroundings is part of the point.

Cleveland and a changed social world

When Austin was ten, her parents divorced, and she and her younger brother began spending summers in Cleveland with their mother. Cleveland was only two hours from their Toledo home, but the move from a mostly white setting into a neighborhood that was all Black felt like entering another world. It was Austin’s first experience of a public space where most people looked like her, and the change was at once exhilarating and unsettling.

The summer brought encounters with customs and popular culture she had not learned at home. Austin struggled to keep up with the loudness and playfulness, dance competitions, talent shows, and line dances; the Tootsie Roll dominated that summer. At day camp, she had to learn Spades rather than the Bible-recitation games she knew. When the other girls sang SWV’s “Weak” on the bus to the community pool, Austin tried to lip-synch along despite not knowing the song. She then listened to Black radio throughout the summer to catch up, while remaining anxious that the other children would discover how much she did not know.

Rural Ohio and the geography of fear

Ohio appears again in Austin’s account of adult life, now not as a contrast between childhood communities but as a route that carries danger in her imagination. She describes fearing that her father will not make it home when he travels through white rural Ohio for work. The passage places this particular worry alongside broader fears for her brother, husband, and son, but does not recount a specific incident on her father’s travels. Ohio’s significance here lies in the ordinary journey’s exposure to racialized suspicion: a familiar state becomes a place through which a Black family member must travel, and whose safe return Austin cannot take for granted.

Narrative significance

Across these scenes, Ohio is defined by differences within a relatively short distance. The two-hour separation between Toledo and Cleveland marks a profound shift in Austin’s sense of cultural belonging, while the later image of rural travel gives the state a more threatening association. Together, these settings show how place in the memoir is shaped not only by geography but by who is present, what forms of belonging are familiar, and what risks a Black family may anticipate.