by Low, Denise;
The Root and Bruner families presented themselves as European Americans and participants in American society, not Indians. As Americans, they could vote and maintain households independently, unlike Native people on reservations. They could be citizens. An 1871 law made “Indians” wards of the government. Native children could be removed and forced to attend distant boarding schools with Christian sponsors. Indian agents maintained control of any financial assets. My family chose to suppress their Native heritage so they could keep their children. They kept their families intact, without knowing that the process of self-denial would have long-range ripples. Erasure of identity has costs, but survival trumps everything else.
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Something happened to Grandfather’s family as the twentieth century began. Perhaps it was a series of small incidents or one catastrophic event. The Ku Klux Klan became a major threat. Community members burned people in effigy as late as the 1960s. Sometimes my grandfather gave me short homilies during card games. Looking back, I see how he staged conversations deliberately as we played casino and gin rummy. Grandfather paced his speech as he told stories, so the images imprinted deeply. My most vivid memories of my grandfather are conversations about persecution, through tarring and feathering. Tar in those days was tree sap, not asphalt, but still the process was painful and humiliating.
One day after school, when I was about ten years old, we sat down at a sunny table. He shuffled, dealt, but did not pick up his hand. I held my cards and waited. “Ku Klux Klan men are such cowards, they have to gang up on one man,” he said. “They don’t fight a fair fight.”
“Who are they?” I asked, as this was no part of my young life experience. He went on to describe masked men who rode horses through the countryside. He paused to give me time to imagine horses and Halloween sheet costumes. “Once they caught a man and rolled him in hot pine tar,” he said and stopped to inhale his cigarette. “Then they rolled him in stinking chicken feathers.” Smoke lingered over the table another beat. He had my attention. “With chicken droppings. That’s what they call ‘tar and feathering.’” I thought about how this would hurt and stink. “They ran him through the middle of town naked. You don’t recover all the way after that.” He picked up the cards, and we continued the game, without our usual patter. That horrible image settled in my mind.
Years later I understand he was telling more than an isolated anecdote. He was explaining his own life, the threats he had experienced directly, as “the man” targeted by the KKK. Perhaps he also described his own humiliation as explanation for his unsettled wanderings. He had reason to escape this harsh reality, through travel or through alcohol.
African Americans, Catholics, and Mexican Americans all were targets of the KKK in that region of Kansas. A cousin told me how townspeople spread disparaging gossip that Grandfather and his brothers were Mexican. That rumor persisted for years. In the mid-plains region most Mexicans are descended from Native populations, not European Spaniards, so this was not far removed from the truth. The KKK is a common enemy. Kansas was the first state to declare the Klan unconstitutional, in 1925, after decades of its existence. But the law did not change hearts of forty thousand Klan members overnight. The vigilante threat was very real in Grandfather’s day, both before and after 1925.
This firsthand story from Grandfather opened my eyes to a world beyond the Disney characters on the neighbor’s television. When I went to school the next day, I felt removed from my classmates as I pondered Grandfather’s tale. Neighbors could be friends one moment and turn into a punishing mob the next. Since my grandfather was different, I also had a double identity. On the way home I ran past alleys and felt safe only when I reached my own yard.
Another time, after a card game ended, Grandfather talked directly about the importance of fighting the KKK. “In secret meetings,” he said, “I spoke against them, said they had no place in town.” He found enough like-minded people to stand with him. “We let them know they had to go.” From Grandfather I learned the existence of a mob whose members tar and feather victims and who threaten violence against outnumbered victims.
The Ku Klux Klan created bitter divisions among families. Some of my father’s wealthy relatives attended KKK meetings, not to protest but to participate, including my other grandfather. I imagine both of my grandfathers at a Klan meeting, on opposite sides. The distance between the two families could not have been any greater. The tensions my sister Mary remembered were deeper than she knew.
Grandfather’s stories made it clear that speaking up is important as well as taking a stand. Words can transform victims into effective fighters. In my child’s eyes Grandfather was indeed a hero. I hoped one day I would be able to speak like him. Placement of words and their timing were critical as he relayed his stories. I was spellbound.
The rise of the KKK explains, in part, the dispersal of Grandfather’s family, including his parents and brother. Even though the Bair, Bruner, and Root families had homesteaded the land around Burns, most left by 1905. The Root brothers scattered to California, New Mexico, Oregon, and larger Kansas towns.
Grandfather’s parents relocated to a Kansas City neighborhood of Native people, on former Delaware holdings. There they were beyond the reach of the KKK marauders. Frank Senior appears in city directories as a foreman in a Kansas City warehouse. In the census records the sons attend school, and then, by the next census, they work as clerks. Years pass, and city directories record their continuing residence and occupations, in a place far from Burns.
Grandfather’s family presence in his hometown is negligible. A few photographs remain and a few mentions in town annals. Still, this was home, where everyone reconvened in later years. Brother Harry repurchased the Samuel Root homestead in 1929. The parents—Frank Senior and Charlotte—returned to live with their banker son, Charles, in the 1940s until they died. As a married man, my grandfather found employment in a nearby town, Newton, and lived there, not Kansas City, most of his adulthood. All are buried together in the countryside around Burns, most under tombstones etched with floral designs.
After his nearly seventy years of life, Grandfather rests. Under the cathedral of sky he is again a brother, son, nephew, grandson, and great-grandson. As far as I travel, I only feel at home near them, in the Flint Hills, where sky reaches closer to the stars than anywhere else. In this eternity everyone is beyond all threats.
*
Kansas City is the place where my mother remembered visiting her Bruner grandparents, not the central Kansas grasslands. She grew up in Newton, near Burns, on the Chisholm Trail. Ties to the dispersed family in Kansas City remained strong. She rode the train to visit and sometimes for extended stays throughout the 1920s and 1930s. She told me bits and pieces about this family time period, in no particular order, and they illuminate parts of her father’s life. He lived as a Native man unmoored from reservation life yet not assimilated into another social order. In Kansas City he and his parents found others in the same limbo.
“Citizen Delawares” of Kansas, as those not affiliated with the Oklahoma tribe were called, continued to live near each other in former Delaware communities, alongside Wyandots. They lived as Delawares always have lived, along creeks and rivers. Northeastern Kansas is a glaciated topography of bluffs like much of the eastern woodlands. Even today, the downtown has intervals of tree-lined streams interrupting the traffic ways. Across the river Kansas City, Missouri’s skyline rises over expanses of urban, concrete structures. It contrasts with the Kansas side, where a block from downtown, gardens are common. People still fish the rivers commercially. A few years ago a friend took me to a Kansas City market where local turtles, gar, crayfish, and perch are for sale. Trapping on the river may still continue. I remember Lawrence beaver trappers in the 1960s providing meat for downtown bars. Hunting seasons for deer, wild turkey, geese, sandhill cranes, and many other types of game are under the state’s jurisdiction. In Grandfather’s day people could supplement subsistence living by working at m
eatpacking plants, rail yards, and warehouses. In Kansas City no one went hungry.
Grandfather’s parents lived at 551 Freeman Avenue, near Jersey Creek and the early Delaware “pay house,” or government agent’s building. Wyandot tribal members John Armstrong, Charles Garrett, and William Walker all had homes in that neighborhood, just before Grandfather’s parents lived there. Today the hereditary chief of the Kansas Wyandots is Janith English, and I have heard her pray in her language. The Kansas Wyandot and Delaware communities are barely visible to outsiders, but they maintain regular tribal events. The Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma has reasserted its claim to downtown Kansas City lands. In 2008 it opened the 7th Street Casino, a few blocks away from Grandfather’s house on Freeman Street.
During my mother’s childhood she did not notice differences between her Miller grandparents of Irish and German heritage and her Bruner and Root grandparents. According to her, differences were just family peculiarities. Mother repeated brief parables about her father—disjointed, but each had a moral lesson.
One summer afternoon when I visited her, she took a drink of ice tea and set it down. “During the Depression,” she said, “Grandfather sold off the land. One of the sons got the farm, one bought into the bank, and my father became a pharmacist.” This was her ritualized tale about the family migration to Kansas City. Each sibling has a place. Like a fairy tale, though, the youngest son of three is the special one.
“Yes, Mama,” I said. Agreement was easier, even if I knew the timeline was jumbled. Her family stories were true, just mixed-up. Census records indicate the family moved in 1905, not the 1930s Great Depression. Perhaps another mild recession of 1902 to 1904 was part of her family’s experience, and she conflated it with the 1930s time period. One brother did stay with the bank, but he worked under Samuel Cobb until 1909. The family land changed hands in the early 1900s. She finished her tea and was done. This was typical of how she told family stories. She had shorthand accounts, not epics.
The third brother, my grandfather, was sixteen when the Bruner family moved to Kansas City, still a student. My mother explained another time: “Father graduated from Wyandotte High School. He took Latin, so he would know medical terms for a career as a pharmacist.” She went on to tell how he was a top student, slow but thorough. “He insisted I take four years of German, not just two and then switch to French. He thought a person should learn one language well.”
When I researched Grandfather’s experiences as a young man, I found he never was a pharmacist, but in the 1910 United States census, at age twenty-one, he appears as a drugstore clerk in Norton, Kansas, near the Penokee Man image. He worked for a druggist named George Moulton. Moulton’s establishment sold tobacco, laudanum, slippery elm bark, licorice, and cinnamon drops.
Moulton also had a criminal record. The state convicted him for selling “rock and rye” without an alcohol permit, just a few years before Grandfather arrived in Norton. The case went to the Kansas Supreme Court, so it must have been a well-known, if not serious, transgression.
My grandfather may have learned the shady past of Moulton and left this position, or perhaps he could not adjust to the incessant western wind. He survived this remote town for only a short time. Within weeks he appears in another 1910 census, counted twice, and again listed as a drugstore clerk, this time in Kansas City. As a young man, he clerked in pharmacies, perhaps as an apprentice in training for certification from the state board. He never attained this vocation. This absence of achievement is the negative image of a story, one never passed on.
When she was a very small child, not long after her 1915 birth, Mother remembers these early years. Grandfather worked in a pharmacy with regular refrigeration, rare in those days. When he came home, he brought ice cream for the family, a luxury. He doted on his small daughter and insisted that she be awakened for this treat. It was one of her best childhood memories. Without explanation, though, he changed direction and never returned to this field of employment. It is but one of many interruptions in his work life.
*
On overcast, cold days I feel close to my grandfather. I discern his plaid flannel shirt and plain trousers. Then his face takes form. His cheeks are concave hollows below his cheekbones, and his whiskers, though shaven, make his skin grizzled. How difficult it is to imagine this old man as a talented young athlete. Yet in Kansas City, before his marriage in 1914, he played professional baseball for several teams, including the Kansas City Blues.
Athletic ability ran in the family. His older brother, Harry Bruner, had been a star on a Young Men’s Christian Association baseball team, so Grandfather followed that example and also excelled. This was the era when basketball evolved into a national sport. One family story tells how Uncle Harry broke Forrest Clare “Phog” Allen’s nose during a game. Allen, protégé of the game’s inventor, James Naismith, went on to develop basketball beyond the peach basket hoop phase as a coach at the University of Kansas and also Haskell Institute, the Indian boarding school in Lawrence.
Uncle Harry also was a first-rate runner and held a national indoor track sprint record documented in the Kansas City newspapers. Grandfather did not leave such a record of sports achievements. He probably participated in basketball and track, but baseball was his chosen sport. He told stories about his athletic feats to his family.
The most substantial evidence of Grandfather’s baseball career was his gnarled hands. Grandfather played the physically demanding position of catcher before padded mitts were standard equipment. Several times fastballs broke his fingers, which in old age were knotted with arthritis. The life of a professional baseball player was tough in the early 1900s. Grandfather told my brother about traveling with the Blues from one small town to the next by train. The Kansas City Public Library has records of the Blues, exactly as Grandfather remembered, but only with accounts of wins and losses, not rosters. Baseball was poorly documented during this era, and players were as transient as the poorly organized teams.
In the early years of the 1900s, in his late teens and early twenties, Grandfather put on the simple uniform with the Kansas City Blues logo appliquéd in royal blue. He took to the field and must have had a passion for the stick-and-ball game developed from both European and Native traditions. In the wide expanses of the Midwest, sports connect towns with each other. They create dramatic scenarios each time a pitcher winds up and challenges a batter. These small duels, less literary than Greek dramas, nonetheless fulfill some cathartic role in communities. Some of my own earliest memories, from the late 1940s into the 1950s, are voices of sports announcers, mixing with the rasp of cicadas in the hot summer nights. Each traveled through the air into our stuffy house, a balance of natural and human voices.
This must have been a wonderful time for my grandfather as he mastered a sport and played at a professional level. Finally, Grandfather chose family life over traveling with the team, he told my brother, so he resigned. But time moved forward. He may have been good enough to play on a better-known team, but he chose to leave the unsettled lifestyle best suited for single individuals. As his descendant, I have to be grateful for the decision that led to my existence.
15. Eva, or Evelyn, Miller in Kansas City, Kansas, early twentieth century. She married Frank Bruner Junior in 1914 or 1915. Author’s collection.
Grandchildren meet their grandparents at the end, as fallen heroes facing mortality. We remember their decline and deaths. None of us alive today saw Grandfather’s best years as a young ballplayer in Kansas City.
*
Grandfather hunted. He knew how to shoot and dress game for family meals, and family was the center of his life. As an older man, he raised poultry and rabbits for the table as a regular source of meat. I think of this, the responsibility for being a family’s provider, while driving to the cemetery where he rests in the Flint Hills of Kansas. Overhead two large birds circle high against clouds. They look like eagle mates. Hundreds of mice rustle through the grasses around me, and these will be
good meals for the raptors.
On this trip to the graveside in Florence, Kansas, I carry cigarettes and a shot of whiskey for Grandfather. These tokens of earthly life smell strong on the breeze. The herb tobacco, sometimes mixed with red willow and sumac, is kinnikinnik, a smoking mixture. Its smoke wafts beyond sight, so prayers can rise to the heavens. Whiskey’s biting smell, as it evaporates, also penetrates to the other world. For my grandmother, who liked geraniums, I bring a handful of the clarion red blossoms to place on her tombstone. They sweeten the afterworld’s dank soil. The two lie alongside each other after their long marriage, still companions.
She may have met him in high school or afterward, when she clerked at Macy’s in Kansas City, about 1913. My mother kept a photograph of Grandmother from those days, chic in a princess style coat and matching hat. As a young, single woman, she worked long hours but found time to primp. He must have caught her eye: a dark, slender man with movie star good looks, and he knew how to dress. Even as a boy, photographs show him in snappy formal suits. Their courtship is forgotten, and no story remains about how the two families accepted each other. No marriage license exists. Interracial marriage was illegal in Missouri until 1967, but Kansas never had miscegenation laws from the time of its formation as a state. Probably the couple married in Kansas City, Kansas, where both their parents lived.
