‘How in the hell did I wind up’ in Springfield?

In happier times? “View of Springfield, Massachusetts, on the Connecticut River,” c. 1840–45, by Thomas Chambers, in the Springfield Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“ route … brings me down and around to the city proper, a long, straight street in another country, with homemade shop signs in Spanish, blocks of Third World decay, citizens of many colors draped in windows, doorways, on corners, in parked cars, often with a look in their eyes that asks what you’re asking – is this right place, how in the hell did I wind up here?’’

-- John Edgar Wideman, on Springfield, Mass., in his 1994 memoir, Fartheralong