Founders' Day

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