“The Fish Can’t See the Water:” Reflections on Slavery and Growing Up in Kansas (City)

Amy E. Potter, PhD - Tourism RESET Research Fellow

Departure

My dad left us rather unexpectedly in June of 2018.

With his passing, the next year brought me into all the expected entanglements with overwhelming grief, anger, even depression. But it also did something else.

My dad’s death that summer brought me back “home” to Kansas (City). Between the ICU visits, my father’s funeral, and general concern for my Mom, I spent several unplanned weeks reacquainting myself with my hometown.

I hadn’t lived in the Midwest since 2006, the year I finished my Master’s degree from the University of Kansas. Since then, my life has been firmly grounded in “the South,” graduating with a PhD from Louisiana State University, followed by a move to Savannah, Georgia in 2013.

Much has happened in the in-between of Kansas and Georgia. My understanding of the institution of slavery as a white woman has taken many forms in many places, a thread that connects my entire academic career. When I was early in my graduate studies at the University of Kansas and to the dismay of a much beloved professor, my master’s thesis focused on representations of Haiti in U.S. newspapers rather than a Kansas topic. I dove head first into the politics of slavery, the Haitian Revolution, and the continued reverberations of white supremacy impacting the island in the present (Potter 2009). My doctoral work took me even further away from Kansas (City) to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and then on to do fieldwork on the Caribbean island of Barbuda. While my research focused on the island’s common property and the contemporary connections to migration, I could not ignore the ongoing legacy of the institution of slavery, which paved the way for a unique land tenure (Potter and Sluyter 2010, 2012; Potter 2015). One summer, I was invited to share resistance stories of enslaved Barbudans at the annual Watch Night commemorating the August 1, 1834 Emancipation Day in the British Caribbean at the former Codrington sugar plantation of Betty’s Hope in Antigua. I will always consider that night to be a formative life experience (Fig. 1).

Figure 1: Reading of resistance stories of enslaved Barbudans at the annual Watch Night commemorating the August 1, 1834 Emancipation Day in the British Caribbean at the former Codrington sugar plantation of Betty’s Hope in Antigua.

When I was still a student at LSU, I took a job as a guide at Magnolia Mound Plantation, a site that was in the process of doing the tough reparative history work of incorporating the lives of the enslaved throughout the spaces of the entire house tour. After graduation, I eventually landed a teaching position in Savannah, Georgia and joined a research team that received funding from the National Science Foundation for a grant entitled “Southern Racialized Heritage Tourism Landscapes in Transition” (Potter 2016). Alongside  my experience as a tour guide, I have spent the better part of seven years researching representations of slavery at plantations in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Virginia (Potter 2016; Cook and Potter 2018; Hanna et al. 2018; Modlin et al. 2018)

Return

A South Asian proverb wisely states, “The fish can’t see the water.”  All of these experiences and knowledge (Haiti, Barbuda, Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia) gave me a new lens for which to see a place that was seemingly so familiar when I returned for a good length of time in the summer of 2018.

Mom and I drove the same route over several consecutive days from the white-flight suburban Kansas side of the Kansas City Metropolitan Complex into Kansas City, Missouri where my dad was located in ICU. On one of those rides, my mind took a break from the grief and began to wander. I started thinking about the road we were driving on, “State Line,” and how that road was at one time in history literally navigating the boundary between freedom and enslavement.

Figure 2: Alexander Majors House and Barn

On another one of our drives to the hospital, I noticed a historic house museum on State Line Road, the Alexander Majors House and Barn (See Fig. 2). Much later after my dad passed, I looked up their website and read the following: “It is likely that enslaved people performed a majority of the construction of the Majors House.”

On Jayhawks, Border Wars, and John Brown

I began to reflect on how growing up in Kansas there was a certain pride one carried that our state had adamantly fought never to be a slave-holding state.  Missing from that narrative of course is knowing that not all of those early white settler’s motives were entirely altruistic—many believed that establishing slavery in the frontier would limit “economic opportunity of whites to own and work land there” (Post 2009: 189). Couple this pride with attending the University of Kansas in Lawrence, famous for its Jayhawk mascot—a mythical bird but also deeply tied to the battle against slavery. “During this period, a jayhawker could be a hero or a villain, depending on individual circumstances or one’s opinion on the issue of slavery in Kansas Territory. By the time the war ended, however, the term ‘jayhawkers’ became synonymous with Union troops led by abolitionists from Kansas” (O’Brien 2019).

Figure 3: Image of John Brown proclaiming Kansas as “Keeping America Safe from Missouri since 1854”

While the institution of slavery was in many ways always present, the violent frontier history that sought to keep it at bay was trivialized. Before the University of Missouri joined the SEC, the University of Kansas and Missouri had an intense athletic rivalry known as “The Border War”—a rivalry renewed in 2019.  Of course, the historical Border Wars or the era known as Bleeding Kansas was a period from 1855-1861 that many scholars point to as the precursor to the Civil War, a time period of guerilla warfare on the border between Kansas and Missouri over the status of slavery on the frontier. During one such athletic match up, t-shirts swept campus bearing the image of John Brown proclaiming Kansas as “Keeping America Safe from Missouri since 1854” (See Fig. 3).

Figure 4: Mural Tragic Prelude by native Kansan John Steuart Curry

John Brown is one of the most symbolic and contested figures of this time period, often most remembered for his raid on Harpers Ferry. However, he first made his mark on the Kansas Territory starting in 1855 as part of an immigrant group from New England that sought to halt the expansion of slavery westward (Post 2009: 93). Brown is famously memorialized in the Kansas statehouse rotunda in Topeka in the mural Tragic Prelude by native Kansan John Steuart Curry, which was completed in 1942 (See Fig. 4).

Kansas City House Museums

Figure 5: John Wornall House Museum

On a subsequent December visit to Kansas City, I decided to take a tour of the John Wornall House Museum, which is a partner site to the Alexander Majors House and Barn, a home I toured in elementary school (See Fig. 5). It was on that tour, I encountered a docent who described the house as a “pledge of allegiance to the South.” I was surprised by the way this docent positioned the museum in relation to the South in a city that was in the Midwest. Geographer Caroline Nagel writes, “Regional concepts, we must remind ourselves, are not merely labels on a map—they are political discourses that create ‘facts on the ground.’ There is much at stake in the way we use geography to imagine the past and to explain the present” (2018: 684). I was troubled by the ways the docent used the house and its former white inhabitants as a way to glorify “The South,” while never fully engaging with the history of slavery within the region even though there were signs posted throughout the tour calling the visitor’s attention to the topic (See Fig. 6). I had spent years focused on guides interpreting slavery at plantations in the South, yet had failed to consider how these same problems translated to other regions in the United States.

Figure 6: Sign discussing slavery at the Wornall Homestead

The following month, I reached out to the staff of the Wornall House and told them about my research background and my affiliation with Tourism RESET. I would come to learn over the next several months about their ongoing efforts to recover the lives of the enslaved in relation to the site. John Wornall, for example, had at least four enslaved persons living on his property and enslaved persons most likely constructed his home. Alexander Majors, most famously associated with the Pony Express, might have owned as many as 17 enslaved persons at the end of the 1850s. When he relocated his family to Nebraska, all six of the enslaved people he took with him ran away with the support from the Underground Railroad.

Figure 7: Survey Invitation

This past summer, I partnered with the Wornall/Majors House Museums and with the assistance from museum staff ran a summer-long survey assessing visitor interest in slavery, the first of its kind outside of the confines of my research team’s efforts to examine plantation museums in the traditional “South” (See Fig. 7). One interesting finding from a preliminary analysis of the data is that visitors to both sites overwhelmingly agreed that historic house museums like the Wornall/Majors should interpret slavery.

While the last couple years have been personally quite painful as I mourn the loss of my father, I am thankful for the opportunity to reconnect with Kansas (City) and more specifically see my research through a critical lens in relation to home. This experience has been a powerful reminder of the ways even I had “southered” slavery, failing to critically reflect on my own complex connections to the institution as a result of growing up in the Midwest (Nagel 2018). Every region in the U.S. and the historic sites within them must have their own reckoning when it comes to slavery and its ongoing legacies. In many ways, the South has unfairly borne the brunt of this work and faced the sharpest critique; meanwhile two universities in the Midwest appear largely free from scrutiny as they relegate a bloody and violent battle over the right to enslave humans on the frontier to that of an athletic competition called “The Border War.”

Cited Sources

Cook, M.R. and Potter, A.E. 2018. "Unfinished Geographies: Women’s Roles in Shaping African American Historical Counter Narratives." After Heritage: Critical Geographies of Heritage from Below, Hamzah Muzaini and Claudio Minca (Ed.): 107-129 United Kingdom: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Modlin, E.A., Carter, P., Potter, A., Hanna, S., Bright, C., and Alderman, D. 2018. “Can Plantation Museums Do Full Justice to the Story of the Enslaved?: A Discussion of Problems, Possibilities, and the Place of Memory" GeoHumanities: Space, Place and the Humanities. https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2018.1486723

Hanna, S.; Carter, P., Potter, A., Bright, C., Alderman, D., Modlin, E; Butler, D. 2018. Narrative Mapping as a Method for Documenting Spatial Narratives in Museums and Heritage Sites: Measuring the Contested Place of Slavery within Plantation Museums. Journal of Heritage Tourism. https://doi.org/10.1080/1743873X.2018.1459628

O’Bryan, T. 2019. "Jayhawkers" Civil War on the Western Border: The Missouri-Kansas Conflict, 1854-1865. The Kansas City Public Library. Accessed Monday, November 18, 2019 https://civilwaronthewesternborder.org/encyclopedia/jayhawkers

Post, C. 2009. Reputational Politics and the Symbolic Accretion of John Brown in Kansas. Historical Geography 37: 92-113.

Post, C. 2009. Rejecting Violence on the Landscape in Lawrence, Kansas. Geographical Review 99 (2): 186-207.

Potter, A. E. 2016. “She goes into character as the lady of the house”: Tour Guides, Performance and the Southern Plantation. Journal of Heritage Tourism 11(3): 250-261

Potter, A. E. 2015. “Fighting for the rock at home and abroad:” Barbuda Voice Newspaper as a Transnational Space. Historical Geography 43: 139-157.

Potter, A. E. and A. Sluyter. 2012. Barbuda: A Caribbean Island in Transition. Focus on Geography. Winter 2012.

Potter, A.E. and A. Sluyter. 2010. Renegotiating Barbuda’s Commons: Recent Changes in Barbudan Open-Range Cattle Herding. Journal of Cultural Geography 27 (2): 129-150.

Potter, A. E.  2009.  Voodoo, Zombies, and Mermaids: U.S. Newspaper Coverage of Haiti in 2004. Geographical Review 99 (2): 208-230.