Great Plains (20 page)

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N
ICODEMUS
, Kansas, is a town with a population of about fifty in the western part of the state. Like many other towns on the Great Plains, Nicodemus was founded in the 1870s; unlike any other that still survives, it was founded by black homesteaders. In 1877, a small group of emigrants from Kentucky and Tennessee, including the families of Randall Smith, Lewis and Henry Williams, Sam Garland, Manuel Napew, and a Baptist minister named Silas Lee, arrived in Graham County, filed homestead claims, and laid out a town. They began too late in the season to break sod and put in crops, and they were short on draft animals, equipment, seeds, and money. Their first winter was hard. They lived in shelters dug into hillsides. Some of the men got jobs on the Kansas Pacific Railroad thirty-five miles away. In the spring, with just three horses between them, they had to do a lot of cultivating and planting by hand. Emigrants continued to arrive, and the town grew. By 1880, it had a population of almost five hundred. By 1887, it had churches, stores, an academy, a band, and two newspapers, one called
The Western Cyclone.
A man from Nicodemus who became State Auditor in 1883 was the first black to hold major office in Kansas.

The people who founded Nicodemus were part of a movement of tens of thousands of blacks who left the South in the late 1870s for new homes in the West. The movement started because many recently freed slaves were poor, mistreated by whites, and disappointed that freedom was so little of an improvement. In Southern states where Democrats had returned to power, blacks had just lost the vote. Some white Southerners opposed to Reconstruction were not convinced it should be a serious offense to shoot blacks; several of the West's famous white outlaws got their start that way. Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, a black carpenter from Nashville who helped so many to emigrate that he was sometimes called the Moses of the Colored Exodus, compared the white Southerners to “a muddy-faced bellowing bull.” Singleton could not read or write, but he travelled all over distributing circulars (which the railroads and Western land companies were printing in volume at the time) about the halcyon new lands on the Great Plains. His Tennessee Real Estate and Homestead Association was one of several “colonization councils” which attracted members by the thousands. He helped to found black colonies in several Kansas counties, and by the end of 1878 had sent 7,432 people to the state. Black people all over the South became excited at the thought of this new promised land. In Vicksburg, a convention of cotton planters urged them to preserve “intact until completion, contracts for labor-leasing which have already been made.”

Because of the career in Kansas of the famed abolitionist John Brown, that state was especially attractive to black emigrants. At first, Governor John St. John made a speech welcoming the new arrivals. Then, possibly because of urging from S. J. Gilmore, land commissioner for the Kansas Pacific Railroad, who said of the blacks, “Indications are that we will be over run with them next year,” Governor St. John began to discourage black immigration, and said that conditions in Kansas were not as promising as the blacks had been led to believe. The Kansas Pacific sent blacks who wanted to emigrate a form letter advising that all the good lands were taken, that no laborers were needed, that the weather was chancy for farming, and that each family should bring $500 in cash. It was probably the only time in history that a railroad ever told the truth of the situation to a prospective settler.

But the effect of railroad propaganda was not easy to undo, and advertising circulars continued to spread by way of Pullman porters, itinerant preachers, and steamboat employees. The blacks who decided to emigrate soon acquired the name “Exodusters.” Their exodus had its own songs, like “The Land That Gives Birth to Freedom”:

… We have held meetings to ourselves

To see if we can't plan some way to live.

(
chorus
) Marching along, yes, we are marching along,

To Kansas City we are bound.

The movement reached a flood in 1879, when between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand blacks arrived in Kansas within a four-month period. They built shantytowns on the outskirts of Leavenworth, Topeka, Atchison, and Kansas City. Their towns had names like Rattlebone Hollow, Juniper Town, and Wyandotte City. Atchison passed an ordinance against the importation of paupers. Leavenworth refused to allow steamboats carrying blacks to land. Many blacks died in the shantytowns; in Wyandotte, in the spring of 1879, they were said to be dying at a rate of fifty a day. Back East, Freedmen's Relief Associations were set up to help them. Blacks still planning to come heard unhappy reports from those who had preceded them, and the exodus, which by then had brought perhaps forty thousand to the West, suddenly stopped. Soon, two-thirds of the black immigrants had left the state. The black farming colonies eventually died out. Today, on the Great Plains, Nicodemus is the only artifact of the black exodus which remains.

I first learned of Nicodemus at the Fick Fossil Museum, in Oakley, Kansas. This museum has a good collection—a pterodactyl wing, claws and all; sea lilies, in bas-relief; an eighteen-foot-long, buck-toothed prehistoric fish called Portheus Molossus; a plesiosaurus fin with bite marks on it—from the world-famous fossil beds nearby. Mr. and Mrs. Earnest Fick, who gave the money for the museum, found thousands of prehistoric shark teeth around their ranch, and Mrs. Fick used the teeth to make oil-painting collages. The museum has many of her shark-teeth artworks on display, as well as a display of telegraph- and telephone-pole insulators, with names like Double Petticoat, Green Milk Glass Beehive, Pilgrim Hat, Roman Helmet, Baby Signal, Bavarian China Telephone, and a display about four emigrant girls who were captured by Cheyenne Indians, and a wagon, and an old-time telegraph office, and a photograph of a local man who was once first in the state fair in Grooming, and a display of photographs of disasters in the area, including the blizzard of 1912, the hailstorm of 1923, the floods over the Tux Smith bridge in 1951, the Page City grain elevator “bulging” in 1956, and the last Union Pacific passenger train to Oakley in 1971. The display about Nicodemus told a little of the history of the town, with photographs. The history ended, “Today, the once-prosperous town of Nicodemus is no more.”

Because I am interested in ruins, I decided to drive over to the town site. Nicodemus is eighty-two miles from Oakley; surprisingly, Rand McNally still showed it on the map. When I reached the place where I had expected to find just a few foundations by the roadside, I found instead a living town: houses, streets, gardens, a township hall, a baseball field; a Baptist church, and a barbecue place called Ernestine's. Cars, many with out-of-state plates, were parked all over. At Ernestine's, you ordered through a side door and sat at picnic tables outside. I had a sagging paper plate of ribs, cole slaw, and white bread, and a Dr Pepper. At the next table, a large white man wearing overalls and barbecue sauce to the eyebrows told me that Nicodemus was in the middle of its annual Founders' Day Weekend celebration, that he and his wife were from the nearby town of Bogue, that people had come from all over the country, and that tomorrow was the parade. His name was Buzz Mauck. He said he would take me to meet a man named Alvin Bates who had lived in Nicodemus all his life and could tell me anything I wanted to know. I got in the back seat of the Maucks' older-model sedan and rode along bouncy streets and into the driveway of a small, one-story house where Buzz Mauck rolled down his window and yelled, “Alvin!” A short, light-brown man came out and walked up to the car and said, “Hello, Mr. Mauck, how are you doin'?”

“Mr. Mauck! Shoot, I'm Buzz to you,” Buzz Mauck said. Then he said, “Alvin, I've got a man here who wants to talk to you about Nicodemus.” Turning to me, he said, “Go ahead.” I got out and talked while Alvin Bates kept his eyes at shoulder level and agreed politely with the questions I asked. After a few minutes I got back in the car and Buzz Mauck drove me back to my van.

You don't see many black people on the Great Plains. In the nineteenth century, there were a lot of black or part-black plainsmen, like Jim Beckwourth, the fur trapper and trader who lived for many years with the Crow Indians, or Desirée, the Missouri River pilot who once took an American Fur Company keelboat from Fort Union to St. Louis by himself, or Britt Johnson, the teamster who rode alone hundreds of miles beyond the frontier to retrieve his wife and two children captured by Kiowa Indians, or Isaiah “Teat” Dorman, the interpreter with the 7th Cavalry, who was killed at the Little Bighorn, or the 10th Cavalry, the all-black brigade which finally ran down and defeated the most elusive of the Comanche bands, or Isom Dart, the famous horse thief and rustler who was killed by the hired gunman Tom Horn, or Bose Ikard, the bronc buster and all-around cowboy who took some of the first trail herds north out of Texas, or Bill Pickett, the rodeo cowboy who used to throw steers off their feet by biting their front lips and falling to the ground. Today, once you get north of Oklahoma, you almost never see a black face at all.

When I returned to Nicodemus the next morning, even more cars—from Denver, Topeka, Wichita, Los Angeles, San Jose, St. Louis, Baltimore—were parked on driveways and lawns. Everything was quiet. By midmorning, people from nearby towns were at the rest area on Highway 24, unloading horses and hitching them to wagons for the parade. Along the main street, people began to bring lawn chairs from their houses and set them up. For a while, being there felt like horning in on a family reunion. Then the crowd started to grow. Local white people and black people called out greetings to each other with the distant heartiness of ship captains hailing. A guy in khaki shorts was carrying a video camera. At one o'clock, the parade began. It was like a parade in someone's living room. Its front was followed closely by its back. There was applause. Then people stood around. Kids were chasing each other and playing. Mothers stood above kids in strollers and talked about them. I ate a hotdog and drank some lemonade with six sisters named McGhee, from Wichita, Kansas. Soon everybody went into the township hall to see a program. Admission was a dollar for adults and fifty cents for children. People sat on chairs against the walls, leaving the floor in the middle open. Many stood at the near wall, around the door. I was next to the biggest of the McGhee sisters, who said she was the manager of a supermarket. We discussed her store's check-cashing policies. The crowd was more black than white; in front of me, a white rancher with a creased neck and a straw Stetson hitched up his jeans and sat on his heels. In the center of the floor, a seven-year-old girl and a twelve-year-old girl began a dance that looked impromptu. “What I want to see is some of this here break dancing,” the rancher said to a girl beside him.

Next came a fashion show of ladies' hats designed by Billie Singleton of Topeka. The hats were big, in dramatic shapes, burgundy and gray and black and white. Mrs. Avalon Roberson modelled them. She put on each hat and strolled around the room so everybody could see it. She got applause all the way around. Then Mrs. Juanita Robinson, of Nicodemus, introduced her daughters Kathleen, Karen, Kaye, Kolleen, Krystal, and Karmen. Her other daughter, Kimberleen, who was pregnant, watched from the audience. First, Karmen, wearing (Juanita Robinson told us) a white suit with a slit skirt, a navy handkerchief, a black-and-white blouse, white ankle boots with a chain on the side, and a black-and-white hat with a veil, walked to the middle of the floor and stood with her left hand on her hip and her face turned to the side. Then Krystal, wearing a white lace dress, a white lace coat with balloon sleeves, and a white hat with navy lining and a veil, came and stood next to her sister the same way. Then came Kolleen, in a casual dress with black-and-off-white-striped pockets on the side, white nylons, black shoes, and a black hat. Then Karen, in a two-piece red suit, a white lace blouse, a red hat with a veil, and white shoes. Then Kathleen, in a purple silk dress with black stripes, a black hat, and black shoes. Then Kaye, in a black-and-blue triangle dress, a black belt, black shoes, blue nylons, and a black hat. When they were all lined up, they held that pose for a moment. Then the song “When Doves Cry,” by Prince, began to play on the loudspeaker, and they began to dance. I looked past the people sitting on chairs against the wall, the women with their pocketbooks on their knees, past the portrait of Blanche White, who was like a mother to the kids in the town, through the tall open window, past the roadside grove of elms which Blanche White's 4-H Club planted in the 1950s, past the wheat-field horizon, and into the blank, bright sky. Suddenly I felt a joy so strong it almost knocked me down. It came up my spine and settled on my head like a warm cap and filled my eyes with tears, while I stood there packed in with everybody, watching Mrs. Robinson's lovely daughters dance.

And I thought,
It could have worked!
This democracy, this land of freedom and equality and the pursuit of happiness—it could have worked! There was something to it, after all! It didn't have to turn into a greedy free-for-all! We didn't have to make a mess of it and the continent and ourselves! It could have worked! It wasn't just a joke, just a blind for the machinations of money! The Robinson sisters danced; Prince sang about doves crying; beauty and courage and curiosity and gentleness seemed not to be rare aberrations in the world. Nicodemus, a town with reasons enough to hold a grudge, a town with plenty of reasons not to exist at all, celebrated its Founders' Day with a show of hats and a dance revue. The Robinson sisters wove between each other, three-by-three. People cheered and whistled. The rancher who had wanted to see some break dancing clapped. To me, and maybe to some others in the room, the sight of so many black people here on the blue-eyed Great Plains was like a cool drink of water. Just the way they walked was something different and exciting. For a moment I could imagine the past rewritten, wars unfought, the buffalo and the Indians undestroyed, the prairie unplundered. Maybe history did not absolutely have to turn out the way it did. Maybe the history of the West, for example, could have involved more admiration of hats, more unarmed get-togethers, more dancing, more tasting of spareribs.