AN IMMIGRANT'S GENEALOGY

This morning I learned that my grandfather's grandfather was born in Westphalia, Germany, he in 1823, and his wife, Mary, in 1853. It is the first time I knew my great grandfather's name, who died before I was born, John Henry, Johann Heinrich Brink. His wife, my great grandmother, I knew. She died in my late teens. Both were born in Lawrence, Kansas, where, evidently, both families settled. I remember her in childhood, Kansas City KS, old dark house with big, heavy furniture. A round dining table on a stand in the middle. Pictures around the walls of dogs playing cards. In the late Forties, early Fifties, the pictures were ancient-seeming. Her name was Anna Schmidt Brink (grandma Brink), daughter of George and Johanna Flosser Schmidt. My suspicion is they went to America from someplace other than Westphalia. I vaguely recall being told in childhood that one was from northern Germany and the other from southern Germany. Westphalia is western Germany, bordering on Netherlands and Belgium. My guess is that George and Johanna came from another part of Germany. I thought, before, it was my great grandparents made the crossing, but it was their parents. 

This explains why, when in Germany, everyone I said I don't speak German to, said, "Yes you do," with an annoyed air like I was attempting a prank. The look that says, don't try to fool me. Westphalia fits my missing link in the DNA reading from ancestry.com. It has my physical history, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, England, Ireland and Sweden. I'm white. I knew rumor of all but Netherlands and Belgium. Borders have a way of changing over centuries, people move across borders for work and marry across borders. I'd guess Westphalia has a large population of Dutch and Belgian ancestry that goes centuries back. Possibly even Dutch and Belgian influence in some of the architecture. I vaguely recall possibly a brother of my grandfather, who went by Dutch. I wondered if it meant Netherlands Dutch or German Deutsch. Probably an Americanization of Deutsch. I'd wondered all my life what state in Germany my grandfather's people went to the New World from, to land in the new Kansas territory not long after the Civil War. My other grandfather's people went to Kansas from Ninemile, Tennessee, in the Sequatchie valley of the Cumberland Plateau, where they farmed for several generations on good soil, sixty miles north of Chattanooga.      

This rush of genealogy info came in the mail from my mother. Last week on the phone I asked what she knew about her grandfather, her mother's dad, Milton Forster. I'd only recently learned his first name, which set me to wondering more about him. His name was John Milton Forster. Oh how I  hated Paradise Lost in school. A John Milton on grandmother's side and a John Henry on grandfather's side. The name, John Milton, tells the English origin of the name Forster. He was a brick and stone mason. Mother told me of some houses I remember from childhood that he did the rock work on. He died a decade before I came along. No information on where he was born or his parents, only that he was born in 1869. He married my great grandmother, Ettie Zerilda Mann, in Nevada, Missouri, 1897. I remember her from childhood, her long, thin hair, remember loving her like crazy, grandma Forster, and mourning her death when I was 14. The name, Mann, has a German ring to it, Thomas Mann. Might be some more German blood through her. John Milton Forster is definitely English, and Protestant. Forster would be an English name, going by EM Forster, the early Twentieth Century writer. Must-be English is as far as I can get with the Forsters.  

I learned about a decade ago of my Worthington origins. original multiple-great grandfather left northwestern England, Morley in Cheshire county. He left in exile for being a Quaker. Must have been some seriously divisive religion politics going around at the time. He went to Dublin with his wife, Alice Taylor, worked three years to gather money for the crossing, and went to the new Quaker colony, Pennsylvania, 1714. A month crossing on a sailing ship. He kept an inn in the town and a farm in the country. He applied for and received a land grant of 3,000 acres in what is now Orange county, Virginia, where he died. His heir who carried my line went to Botetourt county, north of Roanoke, and as generations went by, on to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, down to Ninemile, Bledsoe County, Tennessee, where they stayed a few generations. After the Civil War, the whole next generation went west. A few generations later, my parachute landed me in the Central Blue Ridge, the same culture as my Tennessee grandpa grew up in. He passed the culture unknowingly to my dad, who passed it to me. My grandmother's people came from Pulaski county, eastern Kentucky. This explains why I felt like I had come home to my real home as I became acquainted with mountain culture in the people I knew. It was already in me. It felt like I had found my people. And the hillbillies became my people over time. I'm grateful for every step along the path that brought me here.  

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REMEMBERING UNCLE MILTON

edward hopper

I saw the date just now, shocked to see it the end of June. Last I recall was coming to terms with it being the middle of June, and before that, the first of June. It's like looking at the moon one night seeing a crescent. A couple weeks later, what seems like next night, I look at the moon and it's full. And sometimes it feels like every other day is Friday. I've gone into the zone where I have to ask the date every time I write a check at the grocery store or hardware store. One day bleeds into the next. Took a nap at six this evening, woke at 8 thinking it morning. The light was the same as 8 in the morning. I was thinking this is Sunday, will go see the race later. Got up, thinking about taking carrots to the donkeys, and realized, stepping into shoes, it's night, not morning. Groggy, boiling water for some tea, the phone rang. It was mother. I sounded like something out of a Rob Zombie nightmare. Sipped a cup of tea while we talked and gradually was able to talk without sounding like a giant clam blowing bubbles from the bottom of the ocean.

edward hopper

She was shocked by a picture she saw of me on facebook, white hair and white face hair. She said I looked like her grandfather Forster. I had a feeling she would say somebody on the Forster side. She said I even look like her uncle Milton, her mother's brother. I knew Milton in early childhood. It was uncle Milton who told me when I was 4 that if he ever heard of me sucking my thumb again, he'd take a butcher knife and chop it off. He added my mother would tell him. I knew she would. I was boxed. Nothing to do but stop. I was afraid of uncle Milton and crazy about him too. He was good to kids and cut up to make kids laugh. He had a belly, smoked a big cigar, talked gruff, and I knew he meant business. When uncle Milton spoke, the ground shook. This is from a child's point of view. From an adult point of view, he was a good natured man madly in love with his wife, Pearl, and she was in love with her man. They were regulars at Tony's bar nearby. To the kid, hanging out at Tony's gave them the golden glow of really neat people. 

edward hopper

Grandpa, Milton's brother-in-law, took me into Tony's a few times, gave me a coke. We sat at the bar. The bartender's name was Tony. It was one of the last neighborhood bars, at 39th and State Line, Kansas City, if I remember correctly, which I don't. It was just over the state line so people from the Kansas side of the line could have beer there easily. It was like an Edward Hopper painting with a golden light in my visual memory. I was Jim Brink's grandson. Everybody was friendly to the kid. Tony's is one of my favorite moments in early childhood memories. The mystery place grandpa and grandma went. They would have been in early forties. I don't have much recollection of Milton's facial features. I remember dark hair, cigar, a WC Fields nose. I'd recognize a photograph of him from that time, but can't call up an image without an assist. I can see him in my mind's eye, but features blurry. I don't recall ever seeing a photo of great grandpa Milton Forster. Uncle Milton was a junior. I had a feeling I'd favor someone from the Forster side. My feeling is my soul connection was with mother. 

edward hopper

Great grandpa Forster, a man I know next to nothing about, has my respect for one thing I know of. My mother's mother was born in a covered wagon, birth certificate at American Falls, Idaho. He had a wagon with kids, a pregnant wife, traveling those long prairie trails and Rocky Mountain passes. Somehow or other they made it back to Garden City, Missouri, just south of Kansas City, where grandmother grew up. Grandmother worked as a waitress and grandpa worked on a golf course making good money as a caddy and later groundskeeper. Grandpa's mother and dad were German immigrants. My feeling is they met on the boat from a German port on the Baltic to New Orleans, a long ride. They took a boat up the Mississippi to the Missouri to the Kansas City area, a stockyard. Jesse James territory and time. Grandpa told me once he grew up in a gang. I thought he meant hanging out with the boys. No, he meant a gang. He and his older brothers were German. They were rough. Probably a gang of German immigrant kids bonding together for protection from the Irish gangs, Mexican gangs, the children of the people who worked the stockyards. They scared the hell outta me the kid. Their grandkids my age scared me too. I might see what I can uncover about great grandpa Forster. 

edward hopper himself

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THE WILL TO FIND ART

patterns of the flow

Why am I drawn to artistic self-expression? It's deep on the inside, so deep I have no conscious recollection of anything that triggered it in early childhood. I believe it must be experience in past lives that pulled my interest to art at an early age. In the early 1990s I paid fairly close attention to astrology, did my own past-life regressions without a facilitator. I'm recalling a day when I was six or seven, standing in the front yard where we lived in Kansas City, Kansas, Argentine township. I was at a time in the life of recognizing self as white. I was thinking of the Indians, what the white middle class calls the Native Americans. I remember looking at my white arm and feeling deep regret that "my people" will not recognize me when they see me white. I realized I was doomed to a lifetime of living on the side of the enemy of my people, the people that killed my family, my extended family, my tribe, my people. It was an unforgettably heavy-hearted day recognizing I was alone in this world; my people will only see me as the enemy. At that age, I had nothing to go by. Never heard of past lives, parents didn't know about anything like that, nor neighbors, nor other kids. I think I died too young in the recent Indian lifetime at age 14 to have accrued enough karmic crimes to condemn my soul to a lifetime as a white man, the most vile enemy of the Indian people. I think I was a white man before the Indian lifetime, too, an artist in north-western Europe, a post-impressionist who, I imagine was so disappointed and discouraged by Western Civilization by the end of that lifetime when I popped a cap in my head. I wanted to leave civilization and came up next time in a Plains Indian tribe, alas in the last years when the US Army was in full genocidal regalia. Turned up next time a woman who died young in the same part of the world as the time before, north-western Europe, taken by Germans to a concentration camp and gassed in 1941. Born in USA 1942, and grew up in the very center of the country, Wizard of Oz world. I'm afraid I saw that movie in the hard times of German occupation or just before, and wanted to go to Kansas where everything is great.

patterns of the flow

Before the mass buffalo slaughter that gave Buffalo Bill his name he wore with pride, Kansas and all the states from North Dakota to Texas were a great prairie of tall grass the buffalo ranged from Canada to Texas. It was just right. Now, preservationists keep small patches of the buffalo grass protected to keep the strain alive, so maybe it can survive this time of mass extinctions so vast we can't think about it, and do nothing about it but advance the extinctions. Now the Texas Oil Cartel is aiming to run a pipeline down through the prairie states, the great American oil spill slice through the heartland. We don't hear anything about extinctions anymore. Nobody cares. Nobody ever cared. A few people tried to make something of it, but nobody much paid them any mind. Everybody knows we have no power over the corporations destroying our earth and blaming it on us. Television took care of its role keeping the population unconscious and distracted, at odds with one another. What we have of a middle class culture is a sitcom. Television is the only input. American movies now are made for tv, their major market after first run. Television deals in the obvious. I live in a world of people who have spent their lives watching television, Americans. Subtlety, irony, satire are gone with exceptions, the Onion and South Park. But their humor is in the obvious. Lotsa action of every sort. Nothing serious. Just a whole lot of killing going on. You don't have to worry about missing something if you go to the kitchen for a few minutes to make a sandwich. You know how it's going to turn out. Sure, television is an art form. So is a fifteen minute painting. Tv is more about population manipulation than art. I grew up in a home where the television was the shrine, chairs arranged in a half circle around it. Reading not allowed. Daddy thought Norman Rockwell was art, took some night classes to learn how to draw like Rockwell. I only knew of the Nelson Art Museum in Kansas City through school when we had a class trip to the museum one day in 5th grade for an educational walk through. Never saw or heard of it again. Longed to, but I was not a free agent. Turns out it was not far from where my grandparents lived, but nobody knew it. I had no idea where it was. It was a big city, especially to a kid.

 

patterns of the flow

 

High school in Wichita had an art class. I wanted to be in it, looked in through the open doorways, didn't have enough self-esteem to give it a try. Plus, everything I saw around the room on the walls looked dorky. I did not want to do dorky art. I'd rather do nothing than what I saw in the room. Of course, I have no memory of what exactly I saw, only memory of my interpretation of what I saw. It looked stupid to me. If I was going to do art, I didn't want to do stupid art. I was probably looking at it with an idea of Rockwell realism the ideal and they were doing loose, colorful things. Aesthetically, I came out of a cave. That part of the country is a cultural wasteland. Chicago was the only place in that part of the world with a modern art museum in the late 1950s, anyway that I knew of.  I grew up in a world where I learned that no matter what interested me, it was someplace else, some place I was not. Nothing but church and television for input besides school, which I had little motivation for. The first time a work of art really caught my attention was in Chicago, age 19. I went to the modern art museum there, 1962, and saw a lot of paintings I did not get, felt like I was in a new world, paintings like I could not even imagine. I saw a smallish painting by Salvador Dali of two giraffes with fire for manes. It spoke to me mightily. I didn't try to figure it out. Didn't even have a starting place for that. It just connected with me that this guy blows my mind. Perhaps, too, I connected with the Rockwell realism, the only art of my experience before that day. The two years in the Navy were not exactly an aesthetic time, except for watching the surface of the ocean. They called it "skylarking." I didn't care what they called it. I loved being on the ocean aesthetically. The ocean is amazing to look at, experience and think about. One thing for certain, the ocean is indifferent to the human ego. Reading Henry Miller in the Navy introduced me to an interest in art. I liked Miller's aesthetic interest, that the painters he liked were the ones that lived around him that he knew in northern California, Big Sur, not the ones in New York. He opened an aesthetic interest in me that was already there.

 

patterns of the flow

 

The college I went to had no art class and no interest in art anywhere. It was the last half of the Sixties when Pop was happening in New York, an exciting time in the art world. I'd become aware of the abstract expressionists as "pure" art, then Pop popped that bubble right away and definitively. I went to New York for a few days to see Museum of Modern Art and see the real thing I'd only been able to see in photographs, like Warhol's soup cans, Jasper Johns' target and painted flags, Robert Rauschenberg's paint-splattered bed quilt, a taxidermied longhaired billy goat with a tire around its waist and paint smeared on its head. Kandinsky, Picasso, Pollack, a whole new world had opened to me. It was a world I did not know existed. Larry Rivers, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, people whose art I fell in love with. On my own in the college years I read about Surrealists, Dadaists, Expressionists, Abstract Expressionists, Pop and everything about modern art I could find, even reading Harold Rosenberg on the Fifties period. Over the college years I gave myself a good education in modern art and how it got that way. Later, after leaving the city for the mountains, I thought I came to the mountains for the peace to write. That didn't happen. I was forcing the writing too much and stopped, telling myself I will not write again until whatever I have to say writes itself. That didn't happen for a long time. It surfaced in the drawing and painting.  Didn't do anything but work. After the first seven year cycle in which I did nothing but work and read. The next seven year cycle started with taking up drawing to get through the winters. Made pencil drawings of local people and buildings through that cycle. Next cycle I took up painting with oil. Came to me automatically like I'd been doing it since childhood. Five years ago I started writing this daily blog as online journal and interest in painting is waning. This has been a kind of chronology of opening to and discovering art from a wasteland. Part 2 coming up soon I'll dive deeper into motivations that drove my curiosity and interest from a world that did not honor art in any way, didn't even know what it was, to finding art everywhere.  

 

patterns of the flow

 

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DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES

romare bearden

The inside of my head is still hearing the thumping rhythm of Cab Calloway's dance band, late 1920s. It's been two days of hearing that rhythm, feeling the rhythm run through my whole body to my feet, making them want to tap the rhythm. In my mind's eye I see Cab Calloway jumping and jiving like Little Richard and Prince, keeping the rhythm going. Monday evening, the writing for the day was done, I had the time for a double feature of two movies I'd not seen since they were new and remember them as some truly fine films. Didn't remember who made them or who was in them, except Harry Belafonte. They were the Cotton Club and Kansas City. Cotton Club was a late 1920s New York tommy-gun gangster tale with Richard Gere, Nicholas Cage, Gregory Hines. It was loaded with Twenties dance music in the time well-off white folks went slumming in Harlem getting off on nigger music and women. Kansas City was late 1930s. It was before the Fifties and Sixties of black consciousness. I wasn't there, but the film seemed an artful depiction of the cultures of the time, the way white people and black people interacted in that time. Racism wasn't even an issue. It wasn't ever talked about. It was in the time when colored was the polite word for nigger. A black woman who worked for some white people, in the movie Kansas City, was being asked not to tell something if asked. She said, Aint nobody ever ask me nothin. That sentence hit me, personally, directly in the heart like a dart. It took me back to childhood having a black family in an actual shack living in the woods not far from where I lived. A couple of other black families nearby. We had a Nigger Town nearby, a section white boys stayed out of. But I never had a problem. I took them as people. I'd speak and show no haughty attitude. Nobody wanted to hurt me. I'm kind of amazed looking back, seeing that I intuited go in peace and you'll be all right.  I walked through the black neighborhood as a shortcut to a movie theater I walked to semi weekly.

 

romare bearden

 

I'm recalling the kid's name who lived in the shack and came to my school in the 7th grade, 1954, the year of enforced integration. Thomas Robinson. Thomas was a tough guy. The kind of tough guy that doesn't hesitate to use a knife. A kid. Thomas was the only one of the black kids I knew when the school opened to them. It was so absurd: the street the school was on was the beginning of a section where black people had lived for a long time, from the time when KC was a railroad center. Three neighborhoods of black people lived on three sides of the school and the black kids had to go across town to Sumner, the black school. They were the best band and best majorettes in the American Royal Parade in downtown KC every year. Never won the prizes. White kids were afraid of the black kids and the black kids were afraid of the white kids. The black kids had to hang together as a gang to protect themselves from the bully jocks, a ruthless gang when you're black, or a white nerd. Thomas was a brooding, angry kid ready for a fight. He didn't like white people at all. I respected that in him. I knew how white people talked about his people, knew white people would just as soon see him dead as look at him. He knew it too. I wouldn't like white people either from his side of the fence. I was half afraid of Thomas, and sometimes he was a menacing presence, but only in attitude, never aggressive toward me with it. I felt like he liked me, because he never provoked me when he provoked the white guys around me. I know he wasn't afraid of me. He knew where I lived and I knew where he lived. He walked by my house from time to time and I walked by his house from time to time. That was all I knew of him and he couldn't have known much more than that about me. I liked him. Maybe I had never been arrogant toward him and he respected that. Maybe. Maybe I simply saw him. I have no idea. We kind of liked each other without knowing each other. I felt like I wanted to know Thomas better. I saw us equals in very different circumstances. When it came to intelligence, I had nothing on him.

 

romare bearden

 

Then one night his mama's shack burned to the ground. Thomas and his half dozen half-brothers and sisters disappeared. I never saw them again. I went to see the parched remains and inhale the scent particular to a house burned down. Their lives seemed vulnerably exposed. I felt sad for Thomas and his mama and the other kids. The shack they lived in was the next thing to homeless. Memory of Thomas Robinson stays with me over all the years when nobody else of the kids my age in that time stays with me. Possibly it's the mystique of him vanishing when the house burned down and I never saw him again. He's the only one of the kids I knew in that time I wonder what happened to. Perhaps I identified with him somewhat, wondering what it was like on his side of the racial divide. I knew it was not something I wanted to experience. In high school, in Wichita, my black friend was a guy who weighed the same as I did and we had to wrestle each other in gym class. He always smelled of liquor, kept a pint in his locker. He didn't give a shit about wrestling and he'd tell me to go ahead and pin him. He never took a shower and I had experience to know. I felt like he was the same as me in black circumstances. I was no smarter than him. And he was a hell of a lot cooler than I was, drinking liquor in school. Yet, I had the privilege of being able to get ahead in life if I wanted to. He didn't have an option. The civil rights movement was in its beginnings someplace else. It made me feel like I was rich having white privilege, when I wasn't any better off than he was, just lived among white people.  I was never comfortable with white privilege. It made me feel like I wanted to explain to all the black people I knew that I'm not like the other white people, but didn't because I knew I was. I was just as two-faced as the other white people when it came to niggers. I expressed my racism thinking I wanted to be able to help them. I liked the black people I knew and there was always a barrier of suspicion of anyone who stepped across the line, from both sides. In early 1960s I got mixed up with some civil rights marches and white liberals who were also acting out their racism wanting to help the poor coloreds in their struggle. Stokely Carmichael showed me the light: white people do not belong in the black movement. Of course.

romare bearden

 

I've watched the movement all the way along, support the movement in my heart, but stay out of it. I'm glad to see the progress. These period films consciously addressing American racism seemed to make as good a depiction of the time and place as can be done on film in a two hour story. It was a racism that was unspoken, but understood by everyone. I find so much distrust across the racial fence even in this time, I don't concern myself with it anymore. We Americans are so at odds with each other it's unimaginable. Both films addressed the nature of the racism directly, no dancing around it. Two scripts of very different visions looking at American racism three and four decades before Martin Luther King dared stand up to the white man. It brought back the black people of my childhood, the Amos n Andy time, the John Lee Hooker time, the Big Maybelle time. My heart ached for them. I remember a bar I walked by on the way to Saturday afternoon movies that set me to prayer approaching it. Tough looking, bad looking black men hanging about outside the door, the days of pomade, and I had to walk by them, them amused by a white kid who didn't seem afraid of them. I was fascinated by them. It was like they were from another world I knew nothing about. The other side of that door was the unknown and music on a jukebox I loved. Two or three of the same old men sat in wooden chairs on the sidewalk beside the bar. We became familiar over the course of years and always spoke. It was a puzzling time for a kid. Racism never seemed right to me, but it was the very nature of the world I lived in. It was too big for me to do anything about. After much thought, I came to the only realistic way I can do something about racism in my world is to regard every black person I meet exactly the same as any white person or Asian person I meet. As far back as I remember, I've been fascinated by the different cultures. Both directors, Robert Altman of Kansas City and Francis Coppola of Cotton Club, were addressing the nature of racism in those times, the two cultures and the divide between them. Seeing these films together I saw the theme run through them both, the story told without judgment of either culture, going back and forth from one culture to the other, in relation to each other, enjoying the music together, a dance.

  

romare bearden, himself

 

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KC RR BLUES

slate mountain ramblers

The snow is on its way. Forecast says at least a foot. 12 to 15 inches was one forecast I heard. I actually dread it. Not bad. The salt truck went by one direction, then back the other. They're doing a great job of keeping the roads clear from before the accumulation starts. Before dark we got a little ground cover, then it quit awhile and started again. A foot of snow. That means several inches by 9am. Maybe half that much. My water will be frozen by then. If Sue or somebody gets to the station to open up and turn it on, I'll go. That means somebody did, therefore I can. I like the front wheel drive. About the same as 4wheel. What it doesn't have that a truck with 4wheel has is something I don't need or want. All the years I drove 4wheel drive trucks I never once went 4wheelin. For me, it's a tool to get me from one place to another. Front wheel works. I like the way this car sits down on the road with a well placed center of gravity and not too mushy springs for the curves.

By morning we'll know what the forecast meant. We're so tired of it. We've not had snow like this in 15 or so years. We're spoiled. Now a winter like they used to be is exceptional. The road crews are on top of it. Everybody I talk with is over it. Haven't we had enough? But I don't know anybody who sees it as anything but a good thing. We need the ground water, it kills flea eggs, so the dogs and cats and everything else covered with hair won't have fleas so bad this coming summer. One thing I'd say Noah had more than 2 of on the Ark is fleas.

Friday night at the Rex Theater in Galax on 98.1 FM. I thought to turn it on just as it started. Slate Mountain Ramblers tonight. There's no way I can turn that off. I'd been listening to some Brahms quartets before by the Alban Berg String Quartet. I don't feel like there's a great deal of difference between them. Both bands have master fiddlers layin it to it. The banjo gives a dimension the other misses with all of it bowed instruments. Marsha's banjo plays perfectly with her dad's fiddle. She grew up playing banjo with daddy's fiddle and mama's bass. They're from Ararat, Virginia, across the state line north of MtAiry.

I brought up a picture of Slate Mountain Ramblers from the fiddler's convention a few years ago. Bowman can play a fiddle. Marsha can play the banjo too. Marsha plays the banjo a different way on each tune. Her playing is perfection with the notes of his fiddle. It's like people singing together who have sung together for a lot of years. Marsha's banjo is every bit as interesting to listen to alongside the fiddle as the fiddle. Thornton and Emily Spencer have that kind of intunement with each other. Richard Bowman has been playing for years and he gets better all the time. The bands recent cds are first rate old time string band music.

They're layin it to Kansas City Railroad Blues. I feel kind of partial to that tune as I grew up with the KC railroad switching yard the center of the section of KC I came up in, Argentine. My grandfather was an engineer, went to KC when he was young to work on the railroad. He died 7 years before I was born. I never knew him, never was told much about him. Not for any reason but in my family nobody who knew him would think a little kid would be interested, plus, where would you start? KC Railroad Blues is a kind of haunting tune for me, like a ghost of my grandpa in the air above the railroad yard in KC. Those tracks I saw in a kind of mystery, the landscape my grandpa lived in, the grandpa I never knew. I didn't idealize him by any means. It's just that the railroad tracks symbolized him for me in childhood. Grandpa's unknown world. The other side of a tall fence I could hear whistles and the sounds of train engines float over.

Grades K-6 the school I went to, Benjamin Franklin, a big stone fortress of a building erected in the time when education was held in high regard. It had a beautiful interior of hardwood floors, everything well taken care of by a janitor who knew all the kids. Beside the school ran Metropolitan Ave, the Main St. Running the other side of the street railroad tracks, several tracks wide. Running beside that was the Kaw River. The other side of the river is a section called Turner, and not far from the river is the cemetery where where Katy Sage, the little girl of Elk Creek, Virginia, evidently kidnapped by Indians is buried. She was taken in as the chief's daughter of the Wyandotte tribe in Ohio. It was 5 miles by road from the cemetery to the house I grew up in. 4 miles from the school, having to go down quite a ways to the bridge then come back about the same distance the other side. That would put the cemetery almost straight across the river from the school. Maybe by crow one mile.

That about knocked me over when I read the biography of Katy Sage that's in the library and saw she was buried in Turner. Last time I was out that way, I found her grave. I'd guestimated it 5 miles by road from the house to the cemetery. I measured it with the odometer and it was exactly 5 miles. Katy Sage's grave was the other side of the river the whole time I was a kid. Yeah, the chief took her for is daughter. She had blond hair. White jungle goddess. Her first husband was the next chief. He died, then she married the next chief. He died and she was married by the next chief. This is over a span probably 60 years. She was evidently the prize of the tribe. Good Luck Woman.

I believe there was something about a brother searching for years and finally finding her. He offered to take her back to see mama, who was way up in years by then, and daddy dead, but Katy wouldn't go. Why would she? She was up in years herself. The Indians were in peril. Their tribe was pushed west out of Ohio and Katy had to take up at Turner where she lived out her old age. It was Wyandotte County we lived in. I thought nothing of it then. Now it has a nice ring to it.

This is what I find haunting about KC Railroad Blues. It takes me to the unknown in my own origin. I'm ok with it like it is. I don't have any wishes otherwise. It's just that grandpa's life and the railroad and my school and the house he and my grandmother lived in and raised their kids, they roll together into one, sparking memories, the railroard yard itself a ghost, a mystery with a kind of living spirit about it. And I know my grandpa grew up dancing to this very music the Slate Mountain Ramblers are playing. I've been told 2 of my grandmother's older brothers were fiddlers, and they went to Kansas from east Kentucky, Pulaski County. They played mountain music. I expect he could flatfoot too and probably cut a shine as a teenager. Enough to get grandma's attention and hold it.