Childhood Home

Lorain, Ohio

By Tara L. Conley

“This region (Lorain, Elyria, Oberlin) is not like it was when I lived here, but in a way it doesn’t matter because home is a memory and companions and/or friends who share the memory. But equally important as the memory and place and people of one’s personal home is the very idea of home. What do we mean when we say ‘home’”? –Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard

In astronomy, there’s an idea that describes how displacement and difference observed in a perceived object depends on the viewpoint, or the location from which the object is observed. Parallax, from the Greek word parallaxis, or change, is a multidimensional way of seeing. In literature, and by extension film, parallax is a device sometimes used to tell a story about a single event, place, or person through the perspective of multiple characters. James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920) employs parallax, as does Netflix’s Kaleidoscope (2023) and Knives Out (2020-2022), as well as David Fincher’s 2014 psychological thriller, Gone Girl. 

In my classroom, when I discuss the idea of social difference, I hold up a marker. I ask students to describe exactly what they see from their vantage point. Each description is slightly different: “it’s plastic and round,” one student says. “It’s hard to see from where I sit,” says another. The story of the marker, as told by my students, contains multitudes. The point of this exercise is to show how perceived differences depend on perception, and to demonstrate how the relationship between subject and object is mediated. Perception is never truly unidirectional, and affected by our memory, ways of knowing and being, and a sense of place and environment. We don’t so much observe objects out there as we become affected by the experience of seeing.

I’ve been thinking a lot about parallax lately as I revisit previous writings on Toni Morrison, fellow Ohioan and Lorain County native. During the summer of 2019, I published a piece for CityLab/Bloomberg about visiting Toni Morrison’s childhood home in Lorain a few days after she passed. My article was among others published at the time that highlighted Morrison’s legacy as a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and cherished luminary on the Black American experience. I took a different approach, writing instead about the shape of borders, real and imagined, that make up the regional landscape both Morrison and I call home.

In The Source of Self-Regard (2019), when Morrison asks, “What do we mean when we say ‘home’?” I think about our shared home region of Lorain County, the shape of its borders, and the houses that hold memories of growing up during eras of radical social and political transformation. Born mid-February 1931 during The Great Depression, Morrison’s early life in Lorain was marked by an era of cataclysmic economic downfall. Born on the first day of February in 1981, amidst an economic recession, my early life in Elyria was marked by the rise of neoliberal economic reforms and New Right political movements. Despite the half-century gap between us underlined by different eras of social and political strife, Morrison and I belong to a shared ancestral line of Black American travelers who migrated to Ohio, seeking an escape from the south, what sociologist Karida L. Brown (2018) calls “the battered womb of the Civil War.”

The decades spanning roughly 1910-1970 transformed Ohio’s landscapes. During this historical period, known as The Great Migration, Black people left the South to seek opportunities in Midwestern cities like Elyria and Lorain. Once bustling, the region gradually decayed as industries left, businesses shut down, and economic progress stalled. For many, including my own family members, this fostered a visceral sense of being stuck in time. Amid the circumstances, Black people were especially vulnerable to the repercussions of these changes and subject to racial resentment as social institutions crumbled around them. 

Even the Black River, a natural tributary that flows into Lake Erie and connects Elyria and Lorain, was once a thriving center of commerce. As time passed, however, it became known for its polluted and treacherous waters that claimed the lives of those who ventured too close to its shores. The story of the Black River became a parable of the sower — once-vibrant, then weathered by time, reflecting the place and dispositions of the people surrounding it. 

Black travelers have always been keenly aware of landscapes that bend and close in on us. We also recognize when it’s time to leave. Morrison understood this too. She left Lorain in 1949 to attend Howard University in Washington, DC, and soon realized the price Black Americans pay when leaving home. During an interview with Colette Dowling in 1979 Morrison says, “if black people are going to succeed in this culture, they must always leave.” She continues: 

“Once you leave home, the things that feed you are not available to you anymore, the life is not available to you anymore … So you really have to cut yourself off.”

I left Ohio at a young age, but unlike Morrison, I returned to live, teach, and make stories about home. One of those stories is my documentary film called Dry Bones, about Ike Maxwell and the summer of 1975 when Elyria erupted in protest after Ike’s brother, nineteen-year-old Daryl Lee Maxwell, was shot and killed by a White police officer. Regardless of where I lived geographically, I always remained tied to northeast Ohio. The reason I returned isn’t merely rooted in being born and raised in Lorain County; rather, it’s the region’s story of social difference that draws me back.

In 2019, when I returned home to Lorain County, I noticed how neighborhood symbols and historical landmarks came to represent racial and social division. For example, while driving towards Toni Morrison’s former childhood home—a modest two-story pale blue colonial at the corner of Elyria Avenue and East 23rd Street—it was difficult to miss the house across the street adorned with a large Trump 2020 banner waving on the porch. It stood as a clear and intentional symbol of White racist attitudes and beliefs in one of Lorain County’s most heavily populated Black cities, along with Elyria. It also served as a reminder that within shared landscapes, disparate realities exist. Four miles away in Elyria, sits the YWCA building, an historical landmark located across the street from my childhood home. When I learned Daryl Lee Maxwell was arrested in the YWCA parking lot during the summer of 1975, bleak visions emerged of a young man I never knew heading towards the end of his life. Less than one month after Daryl Lee was arrested in the YWCA parking lot, a White police officer named Michael Killean shot and killed him outside a local bar, igniting a three-day protest and uprising. These moments, separated by time and space, and imbued with rememory, reveal the legacy of White power in America, persisting through its symbols of supremacy and authoritarian acts of violence.

Morrison’s childhood home in Lorain and mine in Elyria provide vantage points to reflect on the perpetual shadow of racial subjugation in our home region. Through a contemporary political symbol of White resentment and a nearby historical landmark of a haunting past, the answer to Morrison’s question about home crystalizes for me; home isn’t merely a broken place of shared memories or a place where Black travelers come and go. Home reveals a way of seeing with searing clarity Black people’s enduring resilience across cruel landscapes.

Tara L. Conley is an Assistant Professor in the School of Media and Journalism at Kent State University. Her writing on Morrison and living as a Black woman in the Rust Belt have appeared in CityLab/Bloomberg. Conley is currently working on a book and a film about her hometown of Elyria, Ohio. For more information on Tara’s research and creative projects, visit www.taralconley.org. 

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Rural Kingman County

Murdock, Kansas

By Taylor Krueger

During Sarah Smarsh’s childhood, driven by poverty and necessity, she moved frequently between the Kansas prairie and nearby metropolitan Wichita. Born on the precipice of the 1980s Farm Crisis, Smarsh received an inheritance of generational poverty and a nomadic lifestyle. During her youth, she would move between Kingman and Sedgwick counties 21 times before she turned 18. Her experience of the Kansas landscape and the people who call it home deeply influence her work as a writer and journalist, highlighting economic inequality and culture in rural America and bridging the cultural divide between urban and rural spaces.

“The countryside is no more our nation’s heart than are its cities, and rural people aren’t more noble and dignified for their dirty work in fields. But to devalue, in our social investments, the people who tend crops and livestock, or to refer to their place as ‘flyover country,’ is to forget not just a country’s foundation but its connection to the earth, to cycles of life scarcely witnessed and ill understood in concrete landscapes.”

Like Smarsh, my roots run deep through the soil of the Kansas prairie. One side of my family has grown and harvested wheat in northwest Kansas for five generations. On the other, my grandfather was raised on a farm and began his career driving a Wonder Bread truck through southeast Kansas, delivering the final product to consumer’s grocery shelves. Intergenerational values of self-reliance, moderation, and grit are narratives that shaped my upbringing.

My first encounter with Smarsh’s writing was Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (2018), which highlights the tension between rural values and the systemic issues that undermine them.

“I was raised to put all responsibility on the individual, on the bootstraps with which she ought pull herself up. But it’s the way of things that environment changes outcomes. Or, to put it in my first language: The crop depends on the weather, dudnit? A good seed’ll do ’er job ’n’ sprout, but come hail ’n’ yer plumb outta luck regardless.”

As a licensed marriage and family therapist, I’ve learned the context that shapes us is not evenhanded, contrary to the myth of meritocracy. The principles of self-reliance that have helped rural people endure harsh conditions for centuries are the same values that create barriers to mental health care. In a place where your value as a human being is dependent on being useful, shame becomes common. Many of my psychotherapy clients believe they are the source of the problem. My training in systems theory, however, leads me to highlight reciprocal relationships, emphasizing instead that individual problems are systemic, created by larger forces in the family, community, and society.

Smarsh describes her early years observing the doctrine of self-reliance in a trailer next door to a farmhouse owned by her Grandma Betty and her husband, Arnie. The farm was located west of Wichita in the lowlands of south-central Kansas, straddling the High Plains and the Red Hills, with distinct red-brown soil stretching across the horizon. To the north is Cheney Reservoir, a man-made lake used to provide a water supply to the people of Wichita, with boats bobbing on the surface and campgrounds lining the shore. The reservoir borrows water from the nearby Ninnescah River, which means “sweet water” to the Osage Nation, who would be driven off their land nearly a century before the reservoir was constructed.

On a winter afternoon, I drive slowly around unmarked roads near Cheney Reservoir towards Kingman County, witnessing the expanse of prairie earth, water, and sky. I park my car north of the unincorporated community of Murdock, population approximately 37, near a boundary of barbed wire. The sound of stillness familiarly greets my ears as I reorient myself to the “isolation of rural life,” that Smarsh describes in Heartland. In early February, the fields are hushed and hibernating. On an unseasonably warm day, the colors glare under the winter sun. The enormous sky is a bright, clear blue with sweeps of watercolor wispy white clouds low on the horizon. Red dirt sticks to the tires of my car. Green rows line wheat fields stretching forward to tree lines ahead, limbs barren until spring comes around again. I watch the roots resting quietly, pausing as the cold air sits still in anticipation. My father taught me that wheat knows intuitively in its cells the exact right moment to spring forth from the earth, green stalks transforming into waving gold strands for harvest. Undeterred by hailstorms, fire, and drought, the crop continues to grow and change. In this Kingman County wheat, I see the great mystery of knowing your roots are deeply planted, and still not knowing what will become.

There is a mystical relationship that ties Kansans to this land. Smarsh reminds us in Heartland that even in leaving, “no matter where you ended up, like every immigrant you’d still feel the invisible dirt of your motherland on the soles of your feet.” In the same way Kansans are connected to the land, she writes, we are also connected to each other:

“Of all the gifts and challenges of rural life, one of its most wonderful paradoxes is that closeness born of our biggest spaces: a deep intimacy forced not by the proximity of rows of apartments but by having only one neighbor within three miles to help when you’re sick, when your tractor’s down and you need a ride, when the snow starts drifting so you check on the old woman with the mean dog, regardless of whether you like her.”

Standing on the side of the road in Kingman County, with only the wind for company, I feel small in my skin. In this sea of grass and red dirt, I am engulfed by the beautiful, terrible, and uncontrollable earth. Yet, in my aloneness, I am comforted by the sight of farmhouses rising quietly ahead. Looking out at this wild, expansive ecosystem of the prairie, the generosity and gregariousness of small, isolated communities provide me with a sense of hope in the face of systemic ambiguity. Despite the great spaces between rural people, a unique camaraderie binds us together. I’m reminded of a principle in systems theory indicating how change in any one part of the system evokes change on a larger scale. Through her wisdom and writing, Sarah Smarsh calls for collective change in our communities by providing clear testimony about the people of rural America, the landscape, and the reality of systemic issues that affect us every day.

Taylor Krueger is a licensed marriage and family therapist providing psychotherapy to women and children in her rural community. She studied literature and psychology at Kansas State University, and received her Master of Science in family therapy from Friends University. She was raised in Rooks County, Kansas, and her writing is influenced by the places she has called home. She lives in Newton, Kansas, with her husband and two young sons.

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Vegetarian Settlement Company

Allen County, Kansas

By Pete Dulin

Concern loomed like a thunderhead in this untamed place. Miriam Davis Colt, her family, and other settlers intended to make their home in the Vegetarian Settlement Company, a planned community within Octagon City envisioned to become a city “of considerable wealth and importance.” Colt’s family arrived on May 12, 1856, at the proposed site in the Territory of Kansas, south of present-day Humboldt.

With the Missouri border in her wake, Colt beholds the vast Kansas Territory and its potential: “A broad green sea of prairie is spread out before us, and in the distance large mounds stretch themselves along the horizon.”

Soon, however, Colt realized the settlement was not developing according to plan. Six years later, she published a detailed memoir titled Went to Kansas: Being a Thrilling Account of an Ill-Fated Expedition to that Fairy Land, and Its Sad Results.

I drove two hours southwest from Kansas City, Missouri, to see this Fairy Land. A roadside historical marker divulged no secrets. Vegetarian Creek, woodlands, and grassy fields refused to gossip. Time, heartbreak, and death have eroded the imagined potential of this land.

Promissory plans for the Vegetarian Settlement Company originated in 1855 in New York City. A circular proclaimed that morally pure families could raise and educate children at the settlement away from “vice, vicious company, vicious habits of eating and drinking, and other contaminations of old cities.” Colt’s family and other investors sent significant funds, life’s savings for some, to underwrite the development, based on the circular and correspondence with company directors.

Unspoiled prairie and woodland suitable for settlement, farming, and investment near the Neosho River was only part of the allure. Colt believed her family would find community “with people whose tastes and habits will coincide with our own.”

Colt, her husband John, their young son and daughter, her sister, and her husband’s parents departed in mid-April. Traveling weeks from upstate New York led them to Kansas City. Oxen pulled supply wagons ten days toward the promised land. Arriving at nightfall, Colt’s rain- soaked party encountered men and women at the site cooking supper over a campfire and living in tents and wagons.

“The ladies tell us they are sorry to see us come to this place; which plainly shows that all is not right,” wrote Colt. Their lament was a harbinger of struggles ahead.

Settlers found no purported development or shelter from “furious prairie winds” and “terrific storms.” They ground corn with hand mills. Without a sawmill, they cut timber to fashion crude log cabins.

Summer’s blistering heat and plentiful mosquitos battered the spirits of these starving settlers. The river and creek yielded scarce, undrinkable water. Fever caused by malaria led to illness and death. Foraging, subsistence farming, and the generosity of distant neighbors provided meager sustenance. Colt wrote that Osage tribe members took tools and housewares and raided field crops. News of Kansas-Missouri border ruffians to the north spurred concerns.

Colt and her family abandoned the stillborn community four months later. Her sister and in-laws remained behind and died within months. Colt wrote on September 2, 1856, “We start out upon the world again. Many a dark shade has passed over us since last Spring.”

When I visited the settlement site, spring was still a month away. Bluebell, bloodroot, and prairie larkspur have yet to bloom. This soil was once fertile enough to plant dreams. What happens when fragile hope withers and roots immersed in the prairie do not take?

Colt’s experience prompts wonderment at my own mother’s uprooting and journey.

She met and married my father, a U.S. soldier stationed at a base near her home in central Thailand. Mom left her family, friends, and rural village in the early Sixties and emigrated to Kansas City, Kansas.

Love, hope, and opportunity do not fill an immigrant’s pockets. Wayfinding in life involves unexpected outcomes and consequences. Bearings may be lost along the path chosen.

Mom arrived at an unfamiliar place. Routines formed with each word spoken and decision made, and the fog of how little she knew slowly lifted. Understanding bloomed, its tender roots sunk into non-native soil.

She gradually learned English, earned citizenship, and acclimated to American customs. My parents eventually moved out of my grandparents’ home, bought a house in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised four children.

What happens when dreams exact unthinkable personal cost?

Colt and her beleaguered family stopped in Boonville, Missouri, en route to the “known world.” Her husband John, 40, and son Willie, 10, suffered from fever, malnourishment, and likely malaria. Willie died on September 24, three weeks after leaving the settlement. John perished on October 4, cradled in the “cold embrace of death.” Colt buried them, returned to New York, and bought a five-acre lot.

My mother remained entrenched despite life’s unpredictable storms – divorce, the death of a son, tangled family ties near and far, and health issues prompting thoughts of her mortality and legacy.

What happens when choices and consequences become uneasy cousins?

Colt and fellow settlers faced stark choices. Shed the weight of sunk costs, sever the cumbersome tether of hope? Colt sharpened her survival skills against the grindstone of trial and trauma.

She chose how to lead the remainder of her life, persevering to raise her daughter Mema, publish her tale for income, and establish a home and farm. Her memoir closed with a prayer to “have grace to bear all the remaining reverses that may come in my pathway.”

Footsteps from the past can no longer be heard. The settlement represents more than the sum of broken dreams. Their unrealized vision still exudes the faint residue of reality, a premise to ponder on our journey.

The territory is not new, only our presence on it. Leaving this land and thirsty creek bed, I deposit questions like seeds in soil foreign to me.

What remains when we depart a place? The lips of John and Willie offer no answers. Perhaps my mother knows.

Colt’s story implies that we eventually abandon the place we sought to settle. We will exit the land and return to earth. Death awaits, an assured outcome.

Until then, I am a vessel of my own making. I choose what to carry, what to leave behind. No oxen in sight. My wagon bears hope and conviction, fear and wonder, loss and what remains, grief, sorrow, some fortitude.

Our words and our will, they form within us, born of the same substance, depositing, eroding, ever shifting.

February wind blows against me. I head in that direction and return home, unsettled.

Pete Dulin is the author of Expedition of Thirst: Exploring Breweries, Wineries, and Distilleries Across the Heart of Kansas and Missouri, Kansas City Beer: A History of Brewing in the Heartland, KC Ale Trail, and Last Bite, and is currently working on his next book. A professional writer for more than 20 years, Pete’s work has appeared in many print and online publications. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri.

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The California Road

Franklin County, Kansas

By Diana Staresinic-Deane

On a rise above Ottawa Creek in Franklin County, Kansas, a shallow depression roughly six feet wide hugs the southern boundary of a battered cemetery before it veers north and vanishes into a fence line. Today it is barely visible, a valley of grass and weeds a slightly different shade of green than the field surrounding it. During the years leading up to Kansas’s statehood, this strip of green was a road that saw hundreds of wagons and thousands of cattle heading west to California and Oregon.

“California emigrants are passing in great numbers,” Reverend Jotham Meeker wrote in his journal from the Ottawa Baptist Mission on April 27, 1852. “Four companies encamped near us last night with 1,300 cattle. On this evening three more companies encamp with 700 cattle. These are exclusive of probably 5 or 600 oxen with 60 or 80 wagons.”

The Ottawa of Blanchard’s Fork and Roche de Boeuf and Oquanoxy’s Village were among several bands of Native Americans forced into present-day Franklin County after losing lands in Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio in the 1830s. More than half of the Ottawa had died by 1837, when Jotham and Elenor Meeker arrived to establish a Baptist mission among them.

Born in 1804, Jotham Meeker trained as a printer before becoming a missionary among the Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomi in Michigan. He became fluent in multiple Indigenous languages, and he developed a phonetic method using Roman type to print in several of them.

When the Indian Removal Act pushed tribes into the Plains, the Meekers were sent there, too. In 1833, at the Shawnee Mission, Meeker set up what is thought to be the first printing press in what would become Kansas Territory. He would print thousands of books and other materials in the Native languages of the various tribes moving to Indian Territory.

In October 1836, Meeker received orders to set up a mission among the Ottawa as soon as a printer could be sent to take his place. By the spring of 1837, construction had begun on the first five-acre mission site, which was situated along the Marais des Cygnes River and the Fort Scott Road. This site was partially destroyed in the flood of 1844 — a flood whose high-water mark was thought to be nearly seven feet higher than the flood that drowned much of Eastern Kansas in 1951.

The Meekers rebuilt on higher ground, situating the mission church, cemetery, house, well, and farm on a rise above Ottawa Creek. Although missionaries were undeniably part of the larger colonial machine that devastated Indigenous populations to make way for white settlement, Meeker’s journals and the memories of the Ottawa themselves suggest that the Ottawa and Jotham Meeker had a relatively respectful relationship. Meeker’s journals narrate days filled with visiting families, caring for the sick, and comforting the grieving.

Meeker also documented those traveling along the California Road that passed by the south side of the new mission site. He first mentions the “California emigrants” and a cholera outbreak in 1849. Beginning in 1850, springtime meant hundreds of emigrants passing the mission.

Wagon trails are integral to the history of the American West, and Kansas was often seen as the liminal space that travelers passed through to reach their true destination. Two of those major trails — the Oregon-California Trail and the Santa Fe Trail — passed through Kansas, each traveler on their own journey to somewhere else.

But those trails did not exist in a vacuum; thousands of miles of lesser roads connected the major trails to military forts, Indian agencies, missions, homesteads, water sources, and hunting grounds, and still more roads connected many of those places to each other. Any Kansas road that ultimately linked to the Oregon-California Trail might be called a “California Road,” and one such road carried travelers through present-day Miami County before turning due west into Franklin County and passing through the Ottawa Reserve and Meeker’s Baptist Mission.

“It has now been four weeks since California emigrants commenced passing and we think to this time about 800 wagons and 10,000 cattle have gone along this road,” Meeker wrote in his journal on May 15, 1852. “About 30 wagons and 300 cattle pass to-day.”

Emigrants purchased oats, corn, and potatoes at the mission, but they were less interested in religion, and Meeker wrote that few observed the Sabbath. Emigrants also brought cholera, and on June 15, 1852, Meeker wrote, “California emigrants are returning, fleeing from the cholera. They report that great numbers are dying with it on the Plains. They have two cholera cases with them.” At least one emigrant never left the mission site; the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Gabriel Smith is buried in the cemetery.

The road also brought news and change. On June 1, 1854, Meeker noted that, “Nebraska and Kansas Territories are organized,” referring to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which passed just two days earlier. He also wrote of emigrants who “are squatting around us in great numbers,” signaling the beginning of white settlement in Kansas Territory and what would soon be the end of Indian Reserves in Franklin County.

Jotham Meeker died January 12, 1855, leaving behind hundreds of pages of journals documenting life with the Ottawa in Kansas before it was Kansas. His wife Elenor died in 1856 and is buried in the mission cemetery next to Jotham. The mission fell into ruin, though the cemetery would continue to be used by both the Ottawa and white settlers. Shortly after the Civil War, the Ottawa were forced to sell their lands in Kansas and move to Oklahoma.

The California Road, which was drawn into the official government land survey maps created between 1856 and 1864, was no longer an official road by the time Leonard F. Shaw and G.D. Stinebaugh published their map of Franklin County in 1878. Later travelers followed section line roads, and later still, Kansas Highway 68 and Interstate 35. Although these roads allow for faster and safer travel, they can’t offer the intimate knowledge of a road that hugs the curves of the land, climbing hills, splashing into creeks, and passing through thousands of acres of wildflowers at the pace of a wagon train.

I am fascinated by old trails, and I am forever searching for remnants of paths that once connected us to other people and places. Where we are is shaped by our ability to get there, and I have spent many hours standing in the depressions that still remain, thinking about the people and goods and animals who once followed that path in their journey.

Today at the old mission site and cemetery, a steady Kansas wind carries the sounds of faraway travelers: the drone of high-speed traffic on I-35 and K-68, the buzz of a small plane, the horn from a distant train, chatty bluebirds and nuthatches hopping from perch to perch in the trees. The only stillness is in the old California Road itself. Yet, as I stand in the swale of this former road, I can imagine a time when the Meekers and the Ottawa could hear lowing cattle and creaking wagons hours before they reached the mission on their way to somewhere else.

Diana Staresinic-Deane grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, and currently calls Ottawa, Kansas, home. She is the executive director of the Franklin County Historical Society in Ottawa and a member of the Humanities Kansas Speakers Bureau. She is the author of the book, Shadow on the Hill: The True Story of a 1925 Kansas Murder. Diana can often be found exploring old cemeteries and searching for remnants of historic trails.

Read Jotham Meeker’s journals at the Kansas Historical Society, or visit their archive for a more complete Meeker collection.

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1112 Gillespie Place

Garden City, Kansas

By Rosemary Hope

This is the story of my house and the foursome who gathered for dinner Christmas Day 1959: Truman Capote, Nelle Harper Lee, and my parents, Dolores and Clifford Hope Jr.

It was at the beginning of Truman’s seven or so years of entanglement with Kansas for In Cold Blood, his 1966 nonfiction novel chronicling the murders of the Herbert Clutter family and the prosecution of their killers. Herb, his wife Bonnie, and teenaged children Nancy and Kenyon had been killed by gunshot in the early hours of November 15, 1959.

Truman and his childhood friend Nelle came by train from New York a few weeks later: Truman to cover the murders for The New Yorker and Nelle to help with reporting.

My father was Herb Clutter’s lawyer. Shortly after Truman and Nelle’s arrival, Daddy and the estate’s administrator opened the doors to the crime scene, a tidy farmhouse outside Holcomb, Kansas, five miles west of Garden City. Truman sniffed about while Nelle took notes.

Otherwise, the pair did not get much help from the community throughout December. Truman, a flamboyant, pushy, gay man, was puzzling to townsfolk and stymied by local press and law enforcement.

He and Nelle faced Christmas alone at the Warren Hotel in Garden City. Until my mother issued an invitation.

“Come at one,” my mother said.

“Make it two,” Truman replied.

Mom always looked out for those new in town, young reporters at The Garden City Telegram, neighbors, teachers, singletons — all would all be invited for dinner. She knew who Truman was; she subscribed to The New Yorker. And for a woman who claimed she spent the 1950s with her “head in the diaper pail,” an adults-only dinner was welcome.

She fed the four little Hopes in the kitchen ahead of time. When Truman and Nelle arrived around 2:00, Christine, 10, Nancy, 8, Quentin, 5, and Holly, 3, were introduced and then whisked upstairs to play with their new toys.

Years later, I learned that Chris and Nancy had discussed their meeting with Nelle and Truman in detail. They marveled at their voices — Truman’s high, Nelle’s low — and their appearances: he was “small and pinkish,” she “dark and tall.”

Our house sits on a two-block-long, tree-lined street flanked at either end by brick pillars with bronze plaques announcing

Gillespie Place

Private Drive

Truth: the street was not private and our house, a 1908 bungalow, was among the most ordinary on it. But the trees were special. Despite the name, “Garden City” was not a grower’s paradise. The vicissitudes of a semi-arid climate and near constant wind — “hard blue skies and desert-clear air” as Truman said on page one of In Cold Blood — made growing pretty things pretty hard. My grandfather, Clifford Sr., planted and irrigated the heck the out of the elms after he purchased the house in 1920.

Nelle volunteered to help Mom in the kitchen and shared her trick for getting the air out of baking batter. “You whomp it on the counter,” she instructed while smashing the bottom of the pan on the Formica. This method has now served three generations of Hopes baking hundreds of batches of cakes, rolls, and brownies.

Mom debuted twice-baked potatoes and roast duck. Truman, who “noticed everything” according to Mom, zeroed in on the potatoes. “They lack something,” he observed. Perhaps it was sour cream and caviar (“the freshest, the grayest Beluga”), which he described in 1972 as the only way he could “bear to eat a potato.” This “most delicious ever potato lunch” was to be accompanied by chilled Russian vodka, which “must be 80 proof.”

On this day, Truman brought J&B scotch. Conversation flowed, with Truman holding court. “Most of the talk was about himself, but it was interesting,” Daddy later recalled. “He loved to gossip, especially about his rich and famous friends.” (These were likely Truman’s Swans, ladies at the top of New York society.) At some point in the meal, Daddy rose from the table and recited the kings and queens of England in order.

Back in New York in January, Nelle wrote my mother that Christmas Day with the Hopes, Daddy’s tour of the town, and other shared meals were the “high spots” of the stay.

By all accounts, Christmas lunch launched Truman into Garden City society. Once word got around town that the Hopes had hosted Truman, he was honored with dinners and cocktail parties from Garden City high society. He even collected his own Garden City Swans, who were special guests at his Black and White Ball in 1966 after the publication of In Cold Blood.

People frequently ask why my parents were not at the ball. They weren’t invited, and Daddy knew why. Although he was a Kansas state senator and son of retired U.S. Congressman Clifford Hope Sr., and although Mom wrote a daily column, “The Distaff Side,” for The Telegram, my parents were not in the country club set, not the “in” crowd. Mom did not pick up smoking and bridge as she’d been advised to do when she was society editor for the Telegram. Daddy didn’t golf. They didn’t have a modern house with a conversation pit and intercom system like those who lived on “the Hill.”

But Truman knew what he had with my parents. He retained Daddy as his Kansas lawyer throughout the writing of the book and filming of the 1967 movie. He relied on Daddy’s insider view of Kansas politics, particularly the 1960 gubernatorial race, which could have threatened the death penalty in the state. Daddy is one of five mentioned in the book’s acknowledgments.

Truman genuinely liked my mother. He insisted on writing a guest column for her, and it was a charming recount of his luncheon with Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, at the home of royal photographer Cecil Beaton.

I liked to tease my parents that I was Truman Capote’s love child. I mean, there are similarities between my baby pictures and his “fat years” photos. And he sent Mom a bottle of Chanel No. 5 when I, her fifth child, was born in June 1961. My fantasy stems from the story I was told over and over: Truman showed up at the house midday in early 1962 wanting my mother to join him at the Warren Hotel coffee shop for a gab session. She answered the door, baby me on her hip, making dinner, phone ringing. She plopped me in his lap, noticing his look of horror and confusion as she ran to answer the phone. Like any other Garden City housewife, Mom had no nanny for the baby, no cook for lunch. Truman left alone for the coffee shop, perhaps a bit sticky from our encounter.

The four from Christmas dinner 1959 are gone now. My parents lost touch with Truman after the filming of the movie. Nelle and my parents remained friends, with sporadic correspondence through the years. The house on Gillespie Place, with some replacement trees on the driveway side, remains in the family.

Rosemary Hope resides in verdant eastern Kansas, with twice the rainfall and half the wind of her beloved western Kansas. She lives on a tree-lined street with her husband, cat, dog, and rabbit, and an easy-to-grow organic garden. She is a medical writer and editor.

Photo at top: Hope family home, winter 1960. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2000 because of its association with Clifford R. Hope Sr., who represented the southwest Congressional District in Kansas in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1927 to 1957.

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Edwards County Historical Museum and Sod House
Kinsley, Kansas

By Joan Weaver

Starting in Washington, D.C., you can drive U.S. Highway 50 all the way to San Francisco. Along the way is the small Kansas town of Kinsley with a towering sign that announces you are “Midway” across the continent. Contrary to being just the “midway” of a journey, Kinsley has been the desired destination for many people. Some came on the Santa Fe Trail, others on the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe Railroad, or, more recently, like I did, on a modern highway.

The sign also invites you to visit the Edwards County Historical Society Museum to see how the pioneers lived on the prairie. You can go inside a reproduced sod house built in 1958 by men who still remembered the process. On exhibit are the tools they used and pictures taken during construction. The house contains period furniture and artifacts donated by the descendants of the early settlers. Because the original open-air sod house required continual upkeep, in 2001 the Edwards County Historical Society preserved the house by building a structure to encase it.

Among the early immigrants were the Maxey family from Galesburg, Illinois. On October 1, 1886, George and Clara Maxey gathered their six children into a covered wagon pulled by two horses to begin the 650-mile trip to Kinsley. Penelope “Nellie” Maxey was twelve and very excited and a little frightened. The day before, some mean boys had jerked on her braids and told her that Indians would scalp her.

“Our wagon was very well built and warm,” recalled Nellie in an interview celebrating Kinsley’s 1973 centennial. “Father had it built wide over the wheels so beds could be arranged sideways and that is where we slept. And don’t forget to mention my dog Bounce. He trailed the wagon, walking all the way from Illinois.”

Despite his wife’s warnings to not be swindled, in Missouri George traded their faithful horse for a mule “with more endurance.” It was a long, hard trip, and the family arrived at Clara’s brother-in-law’s brickyard on November 7. “We slept in a tent that first night we were in Kinsley and nearly froze,” Nellie remembered.

The following day, they headed nine miles south to homestead next to Clara’s sister. Remembering her mother’s warning, Nellie said, “When we got halfway there, the mule, Jack, laid down and died. Father walked to my aunt’s place and brought back a horse to team with the other to take us on our way.”

The Homestead Act of 1862 offered “free” land to settlers if they would build a house, make improvements, and farm the land for five years. The Maxey’s claim was ancient sand dunes covered with short buffalo grass and a few thorny plum bushes – no tree in sight. Regular prairie fires and grazing buffalo herds eliminated trees in the prairie ecosystem.

In this area, building with sod was the quickest, most inexpensive way for settlers to improve their claims. Sod blocks should not be confused with the dried adobe bricks of the Southwest. With sod, thick buffalo grass roots held the soil together, and blocks could be cut and lifted intact. Typically, blocks were 24 inches long, 12 inches wide, and four inches deep. They weighed 50 pounds each, and it took 3000 blocks to build a 16-foot by 20-foot house.

There are no pictures of the Maxey house, but a family of eight would have needed shelter quickly. The sod would have been broken with a plow, cut into blocks and stacked. For some families, red clay from the banks of the nearby Arkansas River was mixed with sand and used as mortar. After this mortar dried, it became almost as hard and durable as cement. The same mixture could also be used to stucco the inside and outside of the house.

Sod homes often were topped with rafters covered with tarpaper and a thinner layer of sod, grass side up. Sometimes boards were laid loosely, covered with several layers of asphalt roofing and left exposed.

Living in a soddy had some advantages. The insulating, two-foot-thick walls offered coolness in summer and warmth in winter, aided by burning buffalo chips. However, housewives found many disadvantages. Bugs, mice, and snakes, including rattlers, liked to move in. Dirt floors were hard to keep clean. Heavy rains eroded walls and leaked through the roof, leaving wet furniture and muddy floors.

After the Maxeys settled in, Nellie learned there was no need to fear Native people. The U.S. government had called for the eradication of the buffalo in order to defeat the Plains tribes who resisted the takeover of their lands by white settlers — including the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche. No buffalo meant no food and no Indians.

The next summer’s real threat came from hot winds and drought. The sun beat down every day. Their corn crop withered despite all efforts to carry buckets of water from the well to every stalk. The land was lonely and harsh, threatened by grasshoppers, rattlesnakes, hail-storms, and occasional cyclones and prairie fires. At night, Nellie would lay in bed listening to coyotes howling.

One hundred years later, in 1989, I too found myself moving to the sandhills. I was luckier than the Maxeys, as we purchased an existing six-room, one-bath frame farmhouse built by homesteaders in 1907.

Our moving train consisted of a U-Haul truck, two cars, two pickups, and three trailers hauling our riding horse, two miniature horses and a1959 Ford tractor with implements. The dog rode in the car with our two teenaged sons.

Our entourage took one long day to move 500 miles at a top speed of 50 mph. Compared to the Maxeys, my hardships were minor. I broke a finger loading the horse into the trailer. We arrived after dark to find the barn full of eighty years of detritus. When I put the riding horse into the corral, four-foot weeds obscured my view of an open back gate. She escaped into the dark. Fortunately, the pasture fence was intact, and she appeared back at the barn in the morning, covered in biting flies. When I applied fly repellent, it must have stung, because she reacted by landing a good back-kick on my knee. All I could do was crawl out of the corral, driving sharp sandburs into my shins. Less than 24 hours in Kansas, and I was ready to leave.

In time, life became more manageable for both Nellie and me. She would marry a lawyer and live in a large Victorian house as one of Kinsley’s leading ladies until her death at age 85 in 1959. After thirty-five years, I still live in the old farmhouse, which has since been remodeled with a large master bedroom and bath.

Now, I go to the sod house museum to discover stories like Nellie’s. The names on the donated artifacts I see there are familiar surnames of my friends who are their descendants. I spend time talking to those friends and researching in the old newspapers and the library archive. I suppose I’m a little like the sod house museum, as I too want to preserve and share the stories of the early people who settled midway across the continent.

Joan Weaver has been the director of the Kinsley Public Library for twenty-seven years.  She has a passion for discovering, preserving, and making the stories of her adopted prairie community digitally accessible. Currently she is working on a book about Kinsley’s role as the regional center for culture and the arts in the early twentieth century.

Photo by Bob Obee.

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1909 Annie Malone Dr.
St. Louis, Missouri

By Marc Blanc

Peter H. Clark lived in St. Louis when it felt like its brightest days were still ahead. Relocating from Cincinnati to the north St. Louis neighborhood called the Ville in 1888, the teacher and political orator found a river town on the brink of becoming a national metropolis. Starting in the 1880s, St. Louis would add 100,000 residents to its population every ten years for the next half-century, arguably reaching the peak of its cultural power in 1904 when it hosted both the World’s Fair and the Summer Olympics. Part of this growth was driven by Black migrants from the unreconstructed South, many of whom began to settle in the Ville shortly before Clark’s arrival.

Clark’s neighborhood was also home to St. Louis’s significant German and Irish populations, and the social mixing between the European emigres and Black migrants was often tense; by the 1920s, most whites had left the Ville. However, some residents labored to build relationships across the color line. Clark, a Black socialist who had been collaborating with German radicals in Cincinnati since the days of abolitionism, was well prepared for the task.

Known just as much for his work on behalf of racial equality as he was for his activism in the German-dominated socialist movement, Clark was in the rare position of having the ear of both Black and white Midwesterners. He used his platform to mend ethnic divisions sewn by racial capitalism, reminding workers that the boss was not their friend even if they shared the same skin tone. “Go into the South and see the capitalists banded together over the poor whites,” he implored an overflow crowd at Cincinnati’s Robinson Opera House in March 1877. Invited to the opera house to give a stump speech for the Workingmen’s Party ticket ahead of local midterm elections, Clark seized the opportunity to address what he saw as intersecting national crises: monopoly capitalism in the North and the re-entrenchment of a racist caste system in the South.

In the same speech, Clark showed how the postbellum marriage of southern plantation power to northern financial capital weighed particularly heavily on Black sharecroppers, who in 1877 were more vulnerable to virtual re-enslavement than at any point since the Civil War. For Clark, the same wealthy landowners and financiers who lorded over poor whites “carefully calculate[d] how much, and no more, it will require to feed and clothe the black laborer to keep him alive from one year to another. That much they will give him for his hard labor, on which the aristocracy live, and not a cent more . . . Not a foot of land will they sell to the oppressed race who are trying to crowd out the degradation into which capital has plunged them.”

Clark’s orations reveal a man who was aware that people experience economic exploitation and political domination differently depending on their race and region. At the same time, his speeches attempt to make these different experiences of oppression legible across the diverse groups that he addressed. We know that Clark was thinking about Cincinnati’s and St. Louis’s sizable communities of German revolutionaries in his March 1877 speech because he pointed out that “capital,” the same force that German socialists knew to be dominating industrial laborers in the North, was also weighing heavily on Black farmers in the South.

Clark thereby legitimized Black agricultural labor in the context of the early Marxist movement, which too often considered the factory and its generally white proletariat as the sole sources of revolution. Similarly, his description of Southern planters as an “aristocracy” appealed to the Midwest’s Irish immigrants, starved and subjugated by the English monarchy. While Clark seems to have been the only Black member of the Workingmen’s Party, he never separated anticapitalism from antiracism. With varying degrees of subtlety, all of the speeches that he delivered on behalf of the Party encouraged Europeans and white Americans to understand and ally with his race in the struggle for freedom.

Clark exhibited a striking hope that his efforts to build an interracial coalition of political radicals would pay off sooner rather than later. On July 21, 1877, when the United States was in the throes of a national railway labor strike, Clark delivered his most famous oration, “Socialism: The Remedy for the Evils of Society.” He predicted that “twenty years from today there will not be a railroad belonging to a private corporation; all will be owned by the government and worked in the interests of the people.”

This, of course, did not happen. The railroad monopolies coordinated with the federal government to violently crush the strikes, and today a handful of behemoth corporations continue to dominate the country’s major freightways. Knowing that Clark believed the U.S. would nationalize its railroads by 1900, it is difficult to stomach our twenty-first-century economy’s acceleration of privatization and deindustrialization.

Today, as I drive north from my inner ring suburb to the Ville, I survey a city that has been hollowed out. Clark’s house, like many structures from St. Louis’s boom years, has crumbled and disintegrated. However, traces of it remain. The foundations of a brick facade guard the edge of what was once Clark’s property, with two concrete steps ascending into a now clover-covered lot. If his house resembled the few that still flank the empty lot, then it would have been a modest shotgun-style abode, perhaps with a small front porch for Clark and his wife, Frances, to talk and watch their neighbors stroll by on languid summer evenings. The home kept Clark within walking distance of the school where he taught, the stately Charles Sumner High, which looks as magnificent today as it did during Clark’s tenure.

Shortly after Clark’s death in 1925, his neighborhood began to prosper. In the mid-twentieth century, the Ville was a crucible of Black wealth and talent. For such a small square of urban land, the number of famous figures whom the neighborhood raised is astounding. Josephine Baker (b. 1906), Chuck Berry (b. 1926), and Rep. Maxine Waters (b. 1938) are just the beginning of a roster stacked with cultural, political, and athletic luminaries; I could pull three different names as recognizable as these from the neighborhood’s historical census. Partially in recognition of the Ville’s sterling legacy, Clark’s street, Goode Ave., was renamed in 1986 after Annie Turnbo Malone, a twentieth-century entrepreneur and philanthropist who was one of the first Black women millionaires in American history. With names as prominent as these, it’s not surprising that Clark does not often turn up in lists of the Ville’s famous residents.

However, with national trends of economic precarity amplified in Black Midwestern neighborhoods like the Ville, the words of America’s first Black socialist may once again command people’s attention. To read Clark in present-day St. Louis is to experience temporal vertigo. Although the speeches that he delivered a century and a half ago anticipate an egalitarian future, his critiques of inequality remain as applicable to the 2020s as they did to the Gilded Age. But what if the 1877 labor strikes had resulted in a victory for the workers? Would Clark’s speeches from that fiery July have been recorded in history books? Would Clark’s house have remained standing, preserved to honor its visionary resident?

That is not the present we’re living in — Clark’s political and oratorical contributions belong to the American people’s dissident counterhistory, not the dominant, institutionalized historical narrative. This is not necessarily a reason to despair. The inequality and unrest of Clark’s time did not prevent him from believing that he would live to see peace and prosperity prevail in every region of the United States. In his nearly 100 years of life, Clark witnessed slavery and its abolition, Reconstruction and its betrayal, racist massacres and cross-racial labor solidarity. Through it all, he maintained faith in the possibility for a social order that was not simply better than what presently existed, but even ideal. What reasons for political hope might I glimpse in a sleepy postindustrial city, or an empty lot? It will take some searching, but I am confident that signs of the cooperative spirit and human perseverance that led Clark to believe in a better world are still visible in St. Louis, like the brick foundations of a house waiting to be rebuilt. 

Marc Blanc is a Ph.D. candidate in American literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Growing up in the shadow of factory smokestacks in northeast Ohio fostered his passion for working-class literature of the industrial Midwest, which is the subject of his dissertation. His other writings on the region’s radical literary history have appeared or are forthcoming in Belt Magazine, African American Policy Forum, and College Literature. You can connect with him on Twitter, @marcablanc.

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Harmonia Cemetery

Battle Creek, Michigan

By Jeffrey Insko

In the heart of downtown Battle Creek, Michigan, near the bank of the Kalamazoo River, stands a memorial statue of the abolitionist activist and orator Sojourner Truth. Twelve feet tall, bespectacled and beshawled, Truth towers over an oversized lectern, presumably addressing an enrapt audience, her right hand resting on a Bible. Dedicated in 1999, the monument commemorates the 27 years — the last 27 years of her life — Truth spent in Battle Creek, much of it just across the river from the memorial site in the home on College Street she bought in 1867.

But if you were to travel six miles downriver to Bedford Township, you might find, not far from the river’s southern bank and perched upon a hill at the edge of what is now an industrial park, Harmonia Cemetery, the last remaining vestige of the short-lived utopian community Truth joined when she first moved to Michigan in 1857. A year earlier, Truth had visited Battle Creek from her home in Northampton, Massachusetts, for the annual meeting of the Progressive Friends in Michigan, a group of dissident Quakers devoted to abolition, women’s rights, and Spiritualism. Truth had been introduced to Spiritualism — the belief that the living could communicate with the dead — through her friends the radical reformers Isaac and Emily Post. During the first half of the 1850s, Truth attended other yearly meetings of Progressive Friends (sometimes called the Friends of Universal Human Progress) in New York and Pennsylvania, as well as seances and various antislavery gatherings with many of the period’s leading reformers and social and religious dissenters.

The precise circumstances that caused Truth to decide to join permanently the Progressive Friends in Michigan remain unknown. Well before the move, she had already earned renown and respect among abolitionists for her powerful speeches, sharp wit, and fierce activism, so it’s easy to see why her Western friends would have been eager to have her join them. What’s more, her time with the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a mixed-race communitarian experiment she had joined in 1843, had accustomed her to living among like-minded radicals and troublemakers. Whatever her reasons, she sold her Northampton property and paid $400 for a lot and house in the fledgling new village situated just south of the river, where the Hicksite Quaker Reynolds Cornell had purchased some 230 acres of land in 1850. Later, in 1855, he platted and parceled 140 of those acres into one acre lots and incorporated the Village of Harmonia. Its name derived from the 1850 Swedenborgian philosophical tract The Great Harmonia, dictated, or so the story goes, by the prominent Spiritualist Andrew Jackson Davis while entranced.

By 1855, the Battle Creek area was already a progressive haven, a welcoming home for the religiously and politically unorthodox, and a central hub for Western abolitionism. Cornell was active in the state’s antislavery society. The city’s first antislavery newspaper The Signal of Liberty launched in 1841, followed by the even more boisterously abolitionist paper The Michigan Liberty Press, which ran from 1848-49 until it was destroyed by fire. Battle Creek was also a “station” on the Underground Railroad, where so-called stationmasters like Erastus and Sarah Hussey, and Truth herself, assisted freedom seekers on their journey from enslavement. It was home, too, to a small but thriving free Black community.

As for Harmonia, too little is recorded of its history, although we know the community was biracial, socially lively (it was rumored to be a bastion of free love!), and included, along with a store and a blacksmith shop, a seminary called the Bedford Institute, probably conducted according to Spiritualist tenets and run by Cornell’s son Hiram. Census records indicate that Truth’s grandson Samuel Banks attended the school for at least one year in 1859. Vibrant though it may have been, the community remained small; as late as 1873, it appears that relatively few of the original lots were occupied with houses. Even worse, a tornado swept through the village in 1862, destroying much of it and shearing the top two floors off of the four-story school. The next year, the Cornells moved away from Michigan and Truth appears to have moved from Harmonia about the same time, though she left the house to her daughter Sophia, where she and her family lived for another 30 years. In 1867, Truth purchased and moved into the house on College Street.

Other than a handful of headstones, almost all visible traces of Harmonia have long since been erased, overwhelmed by the twin forces of empire and industrialization. During the first world war, the land of utopian dreams was converted into a military training ground named, unfortunately, for the Michigan native and disgraced Army general George Armstrong Custer; the schoolhouse itself was converted, literally, into a gun school. Today, Fort Custer remains a National Guard Training Center. The rest of the area hosts an industrial park populated mainly by facilities that produce automotive parts. Earlier this year, when a local historian set out to pinpoint the precise location of Truth’s Harmonia residence, plat maps revealed that the site is now the recycling center at a thermal manufacturing plant.

As for the Kalamazoo River at the bottom of the hill, for centuries the life-giving artery of the region for indigenous peoples, settlers, and utopians alike, it has suffered from decades of industrial pollution, not least the million gallons of diluted bitumen that gushed into the river after an oil pipeline burst just upriver from Battle Creek in 2010. Four years and a billion dollars worth of cleanup after the spill improved the condition of the river considerably, but a significant amount of unrecoverable oil still remains. West of Battle Creek, areas of the river long ago contaminated with PCBs remain as well. Ongoing mitigation efforts at those sites have been severely hampered recently by a botched dam drawdown in 2021 that released hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of sludge and sediment, smothering fish spawning habitats and creating massive mudflats. The river suffers still.

How many times, one wonders, must Truth and her comrades have crossed that river unspoiled, planning for justice? Even more terribly, perhaps, the route taken by that same pipeline as it traverses the state on its way to petrochemical refineries in Ontario uncannily follows the pathway to freedom taken by hundreds of the formerly enslaved, seeking refuge, not toxins, on the other side of the border. Underground transport today portends ecocide and planetary destruction rather than freedom. Which is to say that now, as much as then, we need Sojourner Truth’s expansive vision of justice. We also need more of the courage she displayed in pursuit of it.

Jeffrey Insko is Professor of English at Oakland University in Michigan, where he teaches courses in nineteenth-century US literary history and culture and the Environmental Humanities. He is the author of History, Abolition, and the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing (Oxford, 2018) and the editor of the Norton Library edition of Moby-Dick (2023). He is currently writing a book about the Kalamazoo River oil spill.

Photo by Tom Deater.

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Mark Twain National Forest

Shell Knob, Missouri

By Aaron Hadlow

There is a burled oak tree that stands on the knuckle of a ridge finger behind my parent’s house in Shell Knob, Missouri. Despite its disfigurement, the oak is otherwise straight and tall. Given the oak’s stature, the other trees around it have little choice to stretch for sunlight and grow tall and straight too. As a child, I recall that oak’s bloom of leaves in the spring reached what I perceived, from the Mark Twain National Forest floor, to be a heaven, even if just a lower one. The oak is a waymarker tree and many times growing up I was relieved to pass by it, knowing that the comfort of home was not far. I fear now I would become lost if I tried to find that oak, even though those woods are quite familiar. One may become lost even among the familiar.

Thomas Hart Benton, one of Missouri’s most storied artists, knew this sense of estrangement all too well. I became acquainted with Benton’s work when I was in elementary school. On a road trip from Southwest Missouri to Columbia to watch the state high school basketball championships, my father stopped at the Capitol building in Jefferson City. My brother and I raced through the wide polished corridors of the Capitol, the stone echoing footsteps and our voices. Our father led us to the Missouri House of Representatives Lounge. Once inside the room, Benton’s many paneled mural, The Social History of the State of Missouri (1936), stilled our feet and voices.

As an adult, I can now see the mural is characterized by Benton’s depiction of laboring bodies. They are often sinewy, in fluid motion, bent under a gravity of some unidentified downward pressure that suggests the yoke of their exploiters. Their bodies rarely find repose, except for a cabal of politicians who sit smoking Roi-Tans and drinking, presumably, bathtub gin. Those bodies yield to the same gravity throughout the work but find a comfortable recumbent ease. The stylistic truth of Benton’s mural is only part of its genius.

But the dissonance is striking between the way Benton writes his own life and the subjects depicted in many of his paintings. This dissonance is best exemplified by an anecdote from his autobiography, An Artist in America (1937), recounting a hike in the woods after he planted the plank of his father’s remains in a respectable cemetery in Neosho, the site of his childhood home.

Long-absented from Missouri, Benton had returned to Neosho in 1924 to sit next to his father’s deathbed. Benton’s father was a former U.S. Congressman and as he neared death, his “cronies” also neared to tell stories. In those long hours of vigil, Benton listened, and his father’s friends became his friends. Benton was “moved by a great desire to know more about the America” he’d glimpsed in Neosho. He declared that “for the hangovers of idealistic social theory, Missouri is a grand pickup,” going so far as to laud the “individual will” deeply grooved in the “American character.”

Not long after, the artist set out on a walk in the “White River country along the Arkansas-Missouri line,” in an effort to discover the America he’d been missing. Benton stumbled through the hollows and hills of this area, growing increasingly weary of snakes and cursing the “distrusting” locals, who he blamed for giving him bad directions. He referred to a ferryman who initially denied him passage as a “goddamn son-of-a-bitch” because the ferryman feared Benton was the culprit of a bank robbery the night before. He eventually appraised the locals as “marauding and shiftless hill people,” whose “depredations,” “wild quarrels” and “wild fornications” fill the records of the county courts. Eventually he arrived at his destination in Forsyth. His evaluation of the denizens of the Ozarks was adduced from a hike he estimated to be about 50 miles. I imagine he passed by that burled oak behind my parents’ house near Shell Knob without realizing how close to home he actually was.

In 1935, Benton was commissioned to paint The Social History of the State of Missouri by the Missouri legislature. The windfall that came with the commission must have made it easier for Benton to return to Kansas City to live, though he summered in Martha’s Vineyard until he died in 1975.

Since his death, Benton’s relevance has waxed and waned, leading the editor of my copy of An Artist in America to derogate Benton an “artistic nationalist,” an “irretrievably out-of-date Jeffersonian,” with “nineteenth century” artistic vision. As an irretrievably out-of-date Jeffersonian myself, this all sounds a bit harsh. Of course Benton is problematic for reasons that are self-evident upon reading his autobiography. A privileged heterosexual white man born south of the Mason-Dixon line shortly after the twilight of reconstruction, his ethical blind spots can be easily surmised.

Benton is also regularly criticized for what is thought to be his “provincial” subject matter, verging on caricature. Despite his upbringing in Missouri, Benton’s connection to the America that he is most associated with was attenuated by the path he chose. He fled the Ozarks as soon as he could and only returned for the sort of selective excursions that permitted him to extract experience to fuel his creative work — like a gouty gourmand deigning to visit an ungentrified urban area only for a tasty treat. By the time of his trek through the woods, he’d become all but a stranger to the country. Instead, perhaps the most salient and lasting truth of Benton’s work is the politics of his curved lines. Benton’s strong yet disfigured bodies — bodies that bend down and rise up — defy any theory praising the solitary individual will. It is a truth of form and structure, if not subject. It is the truth of every stand of woods.

Aaron Hadlow is a lawyer and writer. He lives in the Ozarks with his family.

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Churchill Downs

Louisville, Kentucky

By Charlie Cy

In the spring of 1970, thirty-two-year-old writer Hunter S. Thompson returned to his hometown of Louisville to cover the 96th running of the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan’s Monthly.

Less than 72 hours before the race, Thompson was over 1300 miles from Churchill Downs in Aspen, Colorado, busy having, as he later recalled, “one of those long European dinners with lots of wine” with novelist Jim Salter. During the meal Salter prompted Thompson, asking the Kentucky native if he planned on attending the upcoming derby. Intrigued, Thompson immediately phoned his editor Warren Hinckle in San Francisco at 3:30 in the morning, shouting “I have a great idea, we must do the derby. It’s the greatest spectacle the country can produce.”

Straightaway, Hinckle endorsed the pitch and within an hour booked Thompson a ticket, wired expense money and began the hunt for an artist to illustrate the event; Hunter loathed working with photographers, so Hinckle arranged for British illustrator Ralph Steadman, already scheduled to fly to the states, to meet Thompson in Louisville.

What ensued was a frenzied 7200-word, now infamous, first-person account entitled “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.” It was the genesis of gonzo journalism — a unique cocktail of “close to the bone” reporting with subjective, participatory and satirical narration. 

The essay, alongside Steadman’s apocalyptic sketches, mostly snubs the horse race, instead fixating on the local inhabitants and cultural milieu surrounding the derby’s pageantry and debauchery:

We hadn’t seen that special kind of face that I felt we would need for a lead drawing. It was a face I’d seen a thousand times at every Derby I’d ever been to. I saw it, in my head, as the mask of the whiskey gentry — a pretentious mix of booze, failed dreams and a terminal identity crisis; the inevitable result of too much inbreeding in a closed and ignorant culture . . . So the face I was trying to find in Churchill Downs that weekend was a symbol, in my own mind, of the whole doomed atavistic culture that makes the Kentucky Derby what it is.

Thompson’s narrative is also set against a volatile national backdrop. He makes numerous references to Nixon’s America. The falling stock market. Bombings in Cambodia. Interminable war in Vietnam. Antiwar protests that led to four students being killed by National Guard troops on the campus of Kent State, which occurred the Monday after the derby. And a racially fraught atmosphere in Louisville and across the country. There are multiple allusions to the Black Panthers, “white crazies,” race riots and a racial caste system.

I first read the piece in the summer of 2015, the same summer I first read Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man. Both struck like lightning. At the time, I was living in the Bronx, blocks above the Harlem River and the northern tip of Manhattan; I was a non-traditional undergraduate student at Columbia University, studying African American studies and political science, hungry to write about America’s racially divided working class.

I’d never read anything quite like Thompson’s story. In many ways it had everything I’d been hunting for in a writer and mentor, especially for a white man born below the Mason-Dixon Line in the Jim Crow era.

Beyond the lean electric prose, comic hyperbole and current of impending doom, Thompson’s narrative provides an unvarnished insider’s view of the social dynamics in Louisville and Churchill Downs.

As both a globetrotting journalist and a native son who’d attended numerous derbies in the past, Thompson proves to be an expert tour guide. He not only captures the nuances of the town and track, he combats any romantic inclination to side with the local tribe and instead actively critiques the customs, class structure and racial strata associated with his hometown’s bankrupt bacchanal — from the Kentucky Colonels “in white linen suits vomiting in the urinals,” to the governor, “a swinish neo-Nazi hack named Louis Nunn,” seated in the “inner sanctum” alongside Barry Goldwater.

Better yet, he ultimately eschews self-righteousness for self-deprecation, turning the finger-pointing on himself in a moment of catharsis the morning after the derby as he discovers the hideous image in the mirror.

There he was, by God — a puffy, drink ravaged, disease-ridden caricature . . . like an awful cartoon version of an old snapshot in some once-proud mother’s family photo album. It was the face we’d been looking for — and it was of course, my own. Horrible. Horrible.

Thompson’s take-down and insider-outsider perspective resonated with me on multiple levels. Though I was raised in Richmond, Virginia, once the capital of the Confederacy, I was born in Kentucky like Thompson. I grew up with a remote connection to the derby, an intimate disdain for American aristocracy and a contradictory subconscious need to fit in, which often manifested itself in grotesque bouts of drunken mayhem with my bourgeois peers.  

The piece struck me so much, that fall I sought assistance to produce something similar for my senior thesis. I emailed a former literature professor, Dr. Farah Jasmine Griffin, the director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies, a long letter outlining my circuitous path into her formative seminar “The Novels of Toni Morrison,” to solicit her to be my thesis advisor. 

She wrote back, “Yes, I will advise your thesis . . . You are a writer. Therefore, you MUST write.” As a neophyte-wannabe, her words felt like gasoline poured over a dying flame, validating a fragile dream I’d stoked to a point of exhaustion, a dream I feared bordered on delusion. Unfortunately, I never quite captured what I wanted to say for my thesis, and in many ways, I’m still working on that essay today. Nevertheless, after graduating, I would by happenstance move from NYC to Louisville and attend my first derby in 2018 with my dear friend and flat mate Lisa Turner.

Like Thompson’s, our plans were made in haste. It was a rainy, lazy Saturday. But with less than five hours to post in an impromptu fit of spontaneity, we decided to foist ourselves up off the couch in Lisa’s Old Louisville condo less than two miles from the track and attend the 144th Run for the Roses — the wettest derby on record, won by eventual Triple Crown winner Justify.

In three hours’ time, we managed to purchase general admission tickets, hustle downtown to GQ Unlimited to procure proper attire, drive through Ali Baba Liquor Store and Smoke Shop for cigarettes and Old Forester (one bottle would be duct-taped to my calf, the other slugged beforehand), rendezvous with my amphetamine dealer (a mercurial young socialite-hipster I’d met on Tinder who’d first shown me around Louisville), get gussied up, drive to the fairgrounds, shuttle over to the track, enter Churchill’s gates and commandeer two mint juleps to sip and stare at the sea of wildlife getting soaked in the rain with an hour to spare before the paddock judge commanded “riders up.”

The key feat though was improving our station. We had nowhere to go but the infield, “that boiling sea of people across the track from the clubhouse,” as Thompson put it. But Lisa was determined to upgrade. While I was on watch for the slightest sneer by fascist scum directed at her dark skin that stood out like a pink flamingo, she was unfazed and preoccupied, busy eyeing one of the gatekeepers lackadaisically checking tickets to the lower-level bleachers along the homestretch.

The gatekeeper looked checked out like he’d been there all week, as a slew of soused, ivory-faced beasts in ponchos were stampeding in and out of his narrow gate, shouting and slipping over each other on the soaked floors to get to the clogged bathrooms or parimutuel counters to put down bets.

We stood back to study the diabolical flow, while the attendant, anesthetized by the chaos, intermittently checked his phone. I was nervous about our prospects of getting through without being stopped. My veins pulsed with adrenaline and speed. Certain we were doomed, I studied Lisa’s face. Moxie oozed from her eyes. Reassured, I followed her lead as she walked up to the man and glided past him with an arctic poise. We crab-walked down the aisle to open seats, just four rows back from the sloppy track, grinning like hyenas as the rain poured.

Minutes later the crowd, over 150,000 strong, undeterred by the elements, were welcomed to stand and sing “My Old Kentucky Home,” our Commonwealth’s curious state song — a tragic minstrel tune turned derby tradition, bloated with misplaced nostalgia and sentimentality, a song I’d heard sung thoughtlessly since I was a child and grown to despise like the monuments that lined my hometown . . .

Written by Stephen Foster in 1853, eight years before the Civil War, it was inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and often performed in the play based on her novel. Written from the perspective of a slave, the lyrics lament being sold down river away from a bucolic Kentucky plantation to a hostile land “where the sugar canes grow.”

Kentucky banned Uncle Tom’s Cabin from being performed in 1906. In 1928, however, the legislature enshrined “My Old Kentucky Home” as the state anthem. In a period rife with Lost Cause fervor and “Old South” reminiscences, the anti-slavery sentiment of Foster’s tune was effaced, and it became instead a paean to the Antebellum South. Over time, it has been further sanitized; in 1986, the Kentucky General Assembly removed a racial slur from the lyrics, providing a path for the syrupy sweet chorus to be reinterpreted once again.

Standing in the rain next to my friend, dressed in a bow tie and suspenders with a bellyful of bourbon, aping the mask of the whiskey gentry, I could not help but sense in my bowels the decadence and depravity of the moment.

Half enthralled by the pomp and circumstance too, I also could not help but feel a hint of shame as a willing participant in this “atavistic” ritual, as the bridled thoroughbreds made their way from the paddock to the starting gate, the crowd wistfully crooning a slave song.

Charlie Cy is a freelance writer and day trader based in Louisville, Kentucky. Over a decade ago, he took a life changing three-month road trip from his home in San Francisco through the Deep South. This polarizing experience would uproot his budding career as a sommelier and lead him to stow his effects in storage, move into his Mini Cooper and live out on the streets of Los Angeles to contemplate next steps. After months of military showering in a McDonald’s bathroom, reading in the North Hollywood Library and sleeping awkwardly underneath the perfumed purple blossoms of jacaranda trees lining the streets at the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, he began to forge a new path — and becoming a writer, a dream he’d long deferred, became central to it.  

Photograph by Eric Kalet, a professional sports photographer who has shot the major horse races in the United States, including the Kentucky Derby and Breeders’ Cup. His photos have been featured at the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in Saratoga, New York. When Eric is not at the racetrack, he works at Jefferson University Health, a chief health, hospital, and university system in Greater Philadelphia, as a Human Resources Business Partner. Eric has received several special recognitions for diversity, equity and inclusion efforts during his human resources career.

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