Nicodemus,
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. . . .
I first
learned of Nicodemus at the Fick Fossil Museum, in Oakley, Kansas. . . . 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. . . .
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. Joy! I leaned against
the sturdiness of the McGhee sister by my side. From the wooden floor came a
dust that smelled like small towns. Thoughts which usually shout down joy in me
were nowhere in sight. I read in some magazine once that the most important
word in American movies is “home”; that Americans, being immigrants, have
strong associations with that word. The Robinson sisters turned and did a move
that was mostly from the knees down. I was in the middle of America, in the
middle of the Great Plains, in the midst of history, in the valley of the
Solomon River, in the town of Nicodemus: in my mind, anyway, home. “Home on the
Range,” a song whose first verse (“Oh, give me a home…”) is familiar to
millions, has a less familiar second verse, which goes:
Oh, give me
the gale of the Solomon vale
Where life
streams with buoyancy flow,
Or the
banks of the Beaver,
Where
seldom if ever,
Any
poisonous herbage doth grow.
All around
me, I observed an almost total lack of poisonous herbage. The life streams were
flowing with buoyancy. I was no longer a consumer, a rate payer, a tenant, a
card holder, a motorist. I was home. The world looked as I wanted it to. My
every breath was justified. I felt not the mild warmth of irony, not the
comfort of camp, not the cheer of success and a full bank account; just plain,
complete joy. . . .
Ian Frazier, Great Plains
