Gordon Parks
Marmaton River
Fort Scott, Kansas
By Jeromiah Taylor
The grass is fuchsia, the sky bluntly cold, and the horizon swathed in haze. It is late November on the Osage Plains. In southeast Kansas, the distinction between grassland and woodland, or plain and hill, is blurred by the mile. Technically speaking, it is a tree savanna. As for creeks and rivers, we’ve got a few. On my little stretch of highway between Wichita and Fort Scott I encountered the Osage, the Cedar Hollow, the Bachelor, and the Owl creeks. For the rivers, there were the Little Walnut, The Fall, and The Neosho. And then, roping through the 155-acre Gunn Park in Fort Scott, the river I’d come to see: the Marmaton.
It took some time to find the river on foot. Like most Kansas rivers right now, the Marmaton is low. In fact, one offshoot was completely dry, allowing me to walk the cracked bottom of the gulch. While I stood in the Marmaton’s dusty vein, the ground as I knew it rested ten feet above my head, with only the ombre sediment at eye level. In my silent memories, the idle river moves slowly, its wooded sentinels bending in the sharp gust.
At 11 years of age, the photographer, director, composer, and writer, Gordon Parks, was thrown into this river by some white boys under the impression that he couldn’t swim. These events and his circuitous path to fame and fortune are documented in his 2005 memoir A Hungry Heart, a Kansas Notable Book. The river itself is part of a driving tour commemorating the filming locations of the 1969 film The Learning Tree, Park’s landmark film debut, which he wrote, directed, and scored. The film is based on his auto-biographical novel of the same name.
In A Hungry Heart, Parks describes Fort Scott as “touched by all the hands of nature”, and also as “the mecca of bigotry.” A place he refuses to flatten: “bathed in lovely twilights,” yet where “bigotry spewed its venom,” and where he “ate hatred, a lot of it,” as well as “cabbage, cornbread, [and] strawberries.” It was in Fort Scott that Park’s parents and siblings “sowed love’s harvest,” which he learned to share with those “who asked for no more than also to be loved.”
And it is in Fort Scott that he is buried. After traipsing in the rain through Evergreen Cemetery on 215th Street, the sun-bleached lot markers having been no help, I found Parks’ grave, which bears his poem “Homecoming.” Parks reflects on Fort Scott therein, while also venturing, with a heap of triumphalism, that “hatred is suddenly remaining quiet, / keeping its mouth shut!” The unhappy irony of reading that rain-splattered inscription in 2022 will not soon leave my memory.
In 1950 Parks shot an unpublished photo-story for LIFE magazine called “Back to Fort Scott” amidst the Jim Crow-era turmoil culminating in the 1954 decision of Brown vs. Board of Education. The Gordon Parks Foundation later published the story in a book. Isabel Wilkerson, in her introduction, describes Fort Scott as “neither North nor South, neither East nor West, right smack in the middle…and at the intersection of what it meant to be American on the eve of The Depression and as-of-yet-unseen social upheaval.”
As for Parks, Wilkerson deems him the “documentarian of a watershed century.” That sentence caught me in its undertow, as figurative watersheds are a recent fascination of mine. Maybe because I live surrounded by literal ones. Wichita sits on the mouth of the Little Arkansas River watershed and Fort Scott is in the Little Osage River watershed. The Marmoton flows into the Little Osage which flows into the Osage which flows into the Missouri which flows into the Mississippi which empties into the Gulf of Mexico. “Right smack in the middle” starts to feel relative when discussing rivers.
Watersheds, idiomatically speaking, are dividing or turning points. Parks’ writing is filled with recollections of watersheds. For example, as he lay dying, Park’s older brother Leroy, told a 10-year-old Parks, who’d been caught fighting, “Your brain is more powerful than your fists, try using it. You’re to remember that — ok?” One year later, after being thrown in the Marmaton and left to drown, Parks stayed below the surface, swimming to the opposite bank, so that his white attackers wouldn’t see him escape. A brain more powerful than fists indeed.
Jeromiah Taylor is a writer based in Wichita, Kansas, who is passionate about the cultural life of his region. He is a staff writer for Fauxmoir Literary Magazine, and his non-fiction has appeared in The Kansas Reflector, The Sunflower, The Penn-Capital Star and others. Get in touch at jeromiahtaylor.com.
