Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Kansas Journeys

Every April flights of parrots
Fly overhead, red and green,
Green and tangerine.
I see them fly, I hear them high,
Singing parrots bringing April spring... ^[1]

- Perry Smith

Somewhere over the rainbow
Bluebirds fly
Birds fly over the rainbow
Why then, oh why can't I? ^[2]
If happy little bluebirds fly
Beyond the rainbow
Why, oh why can't I?

- Dorothy Gale

More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered prayers.

- Saint Teresa of ivila (1515-1582)

We teach and learn about place through geography, history, literature, economics, ethnography, sociology, and all the other ways in which we create fields of knowledge. We encounter the unfamiliar through the lenses of selective disciplines. We also recognize that these are artificial ways of structuring understanding. As a consequence, we develop inter- and multi-space disciplinary modes of exploring connections and interactions that transcend those boundaries.

The stories we tell are critical to widening perspectives on those cities, countries, and regions in which we live and study. As a European peering myopically into the complex roots of American society, I am conscious of myths, fables, and narratives that offer other ways of seeing what lies beneath measurable and observable realities.

My focus is on two stories that begin and end in Kansas. To a European eye, the state is huge, an area of 82,278 square miles. That is over 5 times the size of the Netherlands. There are more than 17.5 million people living in the Netherlands. The United Kingdom is approximately the same size as Kansas, with a population of over 57 million. Less than three million people live in Kansas. People are few and distances great; endless wheat fields, blank space, an invitation, like an empty page, to create meaning.

It is also not a state immediately associated with mobility. Agriculture makes a major contribution to the economy, wheat production in particular. Farming creates intimacy between people and place; communities cohere in ways that are rare in major European cities. Nevertheless, mobility is a factor in Kansas stories. The American actor Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) was born in Dodge City, Kansas. He directed and co-wrote the iconic road movie, Easy Rider (1969), with Peter Fonda and Terry Southern. Perhaps the most famous of Kansans is aviator Amelia Earhart (1897-1937). The Clutters, an American family rooted in the farming community of Holcomb, had German origins. In the 1880s, just 70 or so years before they became famous, their forefathers, the Klotters, settled in the town.

The key figures in this context exist on a line between fiction and reality. Richard "Dick" Hickock and Perry Smith were real people fictionalized in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. They slaughtered the Clutter family on November 15, 1959. Dorothy Gale was the fictional protagonist of 14 novels by L. Frank Baum (1856-1919). The most famous of these, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), was made into the classic film, The Wizard of Oz (1939), starring Judy Garland. Dorothy Gale's "real" house can be visited in the city of Liberal.

An interaction between fiction and reality permeates these stories. In the similarities and differences between them, a field of meaning emerges that reflects formative myths in the making of America. Hickok and Smith journey within Kansas to Holcomb in search of an illusory pot of gold. Dorothy travels from Kansas in search of wisdom and enlightenment that, she learns, may be found along the way, not in the destination she seeks.

Journeys are built upon imaginative constructions of what may be found at the end of the road, be it yellow brick or the asphalt of US Highway 83. These archetypal journeys resonate with formative American mythologies. The narratives illustrate how we construct space in the imagination, in myth, in hope, in dreams, and in nightmares.

Blood and Hope-Holcomb to Liberal City

The village of Holcomb stands in the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there" ... Holcomb can be seen from great distances. Not that there is much to see- simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad (In Cold Blood, p.3).

It takes around 75 minutes to drive from the quaintly-named Liberal to Holcomb, but there aren't too many who would bother. These towns would be of little interest but for the fact that they represent iconic journeys along a spectrum of possibility. Interpreting mobility preoccupies international educators for that is at the heart of our endeavors. The difference between the education abroad student and the refugee is that one travels towards enrichment, adventure, and knowledge; the other is in retreat from conditions of poverty, danger, and persecution. Contrasting aspirations motivate these journeys but the common factor is that the place of arrival is both geography and myth, reality and dream.

Students of American history and society might also make the short trip to drive along US 83. This road begins on the Canadian border and ends, 1,885 miles later, at the Gulf of Mexico. Sometimes called "The Road to Nowhere," driving south takes you through North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and into Texas. It also represents a mythical dividing line between the cities of the East and wild Western spaces. At the same time, paradoxically, it is a concrete example of national unification; highways and railways connected distances that are, by European standards, vast. US 83 covers a longer distance than London to Moscow.

The small city of Liberal (population 19,825) and the village of Holcomb (population 2,245) have a significance greater than their relative anonymity might suggest. A clue to Liberal's acquired significance is the address of the tourist center: 1 Yellow Brick Road. Not one scene in The Wizard of Oz was filmed in Kansas; it was shot entirely in MGM's Culver City studios, nearly 1,200 miles from 1 Yellow Brick Road. All we are told in film or novel is that Dorothy's home is in Kansas. This did not stop an enterprising businessman claiming Liberal as Dorothy's birthplace. A replica of the house and film memorabilia were moved to the Coronado Museum in 1981. Kansas governor John Carlin recognized the site as the "official home" of Dorothy Gale. A fiction within a fiction, concrete realization of a myth; it costs $12.50 to visit "Dorothy's House and the Land of Oz".

It is not possible to visit 611 Oak Avenue in Holcomb but that does not deter tourists from stopping to stare. There is nothing here to enjoy, no echoes of bright-eyed optimism. A young girl, Nancy Clutter, was 16 years old when she was murdered in the house on November 15, 1959, with her father Herb, mother Bonnie, and brother Kenyon. Ironically, Judy Garland was the same age as Nancy when she performed in The Wizard of Oz.

Richard "Dick" Hickock and Perry Smith, paroled from the Kansas State Penitentiary, drove more than 350 miles from Edgerton, Kansas because a cell-mate had misled them into thinking that Herb kept substantial sums of money in the house. Disappointed and angered, Hickock and Smith slaughtered the entire family. The novelist Truman Capote spent six years working on his book In Cold Blood (1966) which used fictional techniques to explore an event that both appalled and fascinated. A film followed in 1967, a two-part television series in 1996, and the film Capote (2005) depicts his research in Holcomb assisted by his friend, novelist Harper Lee.

Unsuccessful journeys connect these stories. Dorothy leaves Kansas to travel on the yellow brick road to learn of the Wizard's magic, only to discover an empty illusion. Hickock and Smith cross Kansas in a futile search for riches that ends in blood and murder. This conjunction, however artificial, reveals aspects of an American ethos, rooted in history. There is a curious intimacy between optimism, hope, death, and violence.

African American activist H. Rap Brown asserted that "violence is as American as cherry pie" (1967). Optimism and violence paradoxically coexist within the building of the nation. Moustafa Bayoumi, author of How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?, and a professor at Brooklyn College, New York writes:

Guns and violence were integral to controlling, patrolling and terrorizing the enslaved Black people of this country. Likewise, there would be no broken treaties, forced removals and land theft of Indigenous territory without guns... America is steeped in violence. And the roots of that violence go deep. ^[3]

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), a French philosopher and historian as well as an acute observer of American life at the beginning of the 19th century, perceived violence at the heart of the nation. Traveling through 17 states from May 1831 to February 1832, he observed that both Black and Indian peoples were victims of White settler power:

He makes them subservient to his use; and when he cannot subdue, he destroys them...The Europeans, having dispersed the Indian tribes and driven them into the deserts, condemned them to a wandering life full of inexpressible sufferings.

Simultaneously, de Tocqueville identifies a paradoxical and innate optimism:

They have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man; they are of opinion that the effects of the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous...they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement... they admit that what appears to them to be good to-day may be superseded by something better-to-morrow. ^[4]

Over 100 years later, a similar thought resonated in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's inaugural address of 1933: "there is nothing to fear but fear itself." On September 24, 2014, President Obama's address to the United Nations General Assembly echoed de Tocqueville:

We choose hope over fear. We see the future not as something out of our control, but as something we can shape for the better through concerted and collective effort. We reject fatalism or cynicism when it comes to human affairs; we choose to work for the world as it should be, as our children deserve it to be.

This translates into the kind of wistful hope found in Dorothy's vision:

Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true
Someday I'll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far behind me
Where troubles melt like lemon drops
Away above the chimney tops
That's where you'll find me

Dorothy dreams of reality transformed. Transcendent space. Perry Smith's recurrent dreams, as told to Truman Capote, point in the direction of ambiguous but related, mental landscapes:

Since I was a kid, I've had this same dream. Where I'm in Africa. A jungle. I'm moving through the trees toward a tree standing all alone...it has blue leaves and diamonds hanging everywhere. Diamonds like oranges. That's why I'm there - to pick myself a bushel of diamonds. But I know the minute I try to, the minute I reach up, a snake is gonna fall on me. A snake that guards the tree...What it comes down to is I want the diamonds more than I'm afraid of the snake. So I go to pick one... I'm pulling at it, when the snake lands on top of me. We wrestle around, but ... he's crushing me, you can hear my legs cracking. Now comes the part it makes me sweat even to think about. See, he starts to swallow me.

Perry's dream combines a fantasy of the acquisition of wealth with the painful subversion of hope, prefiguring the events at the Clutter house.

However, his dreams also include the vision of a yellow parrot, a guide to redemption, a savior who appears:

taller than Jesus, yellow like a sunflower...The walls of the cell fell away, the sky came down, I saw the big yellow bird... She lifted me, I could have been light as a mouse.

The parrot, Capote tells us, offers Perry salvation: "then, so gently lifted him, enfolded him, winged him away to paradise:" over the rainbow...away above the chimney tops.

Damon Linker, of the New Republic and a Senior Writing Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that "America is a nation addicted to optimism":

We look forward to the future and assume it will be better than today...That conviction brought the first settlers to our shores and then the successive waves of immigrants that followed, most of them convinced that they could make a better life for themselves. Faith in the future ... even inspires our reactionaries, who assure their devoted followers that recent signs of decline can be reversed, and America made great once again. ^[5]

There is, however, another American addiction that return us to the slaughter of the Clutters:

With 120.5 civilian-owned firearms per 100 people, the United States has the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world- nearly double that of the second-place country, in fact. Civilians owned an estimated 393,347,000 total firearms in the United States in 2017 (measured against a 2017 population of 326,474,000) ...the end result of which is that the U.S. is home to more guns than people. An ABC News article ...pointed out that the U.S. has "less than 5% of the world's population, but 40% of the world's civilian-owned guns". ^[6]

Conclusion: On the Road

All journeys, those we undertake ourselves, and those we create for students have some element of ambiguity, and inherent subjectivity. Motivations are rarely simple or singular. The histories and myths of American journeys exemplify such complications.

The epic journey of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark from May 14, 1803, to September 23, 1806, opened up the West. President Thomas Jefferson bought out French interest through the Louisiana Purchase but, in reality, the vast area of land acquired (including Kansas) was home to Native American tribes. Ultimately, the myth of heroic exploration obscures a narrative of displacement and death. The culmination, between 1830 and 1850, was ethnic cleansing and forced relocation of an estimated 100,000 Native Americans on what became known as "The Trail of Tears." ^[7]

The 20th century also witnessed two of the greatest internal migrations in history. ^[8] Between 1930 and 1936 an estimated half-million people left the Great Plain states to escape the impact of falling prices and, in particular, soil erosion in what became known as Dust Bowl migration. ^[9] Many headed for California where they were often far from welcome. John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) chronicles the experiences of the Joad family who met hostility and prejudice; dust bowl refugees, wherever they came from, were denigrated as "Okies".

Woody Guthrie's songs in Dust Bowl Ballads (1940) tell a similar story of those who sought work and security in California:

The Great Dust Storm (Dust Storm Disaster)
On the 14th day of April of 1935
There struck the worst of dust storms that ever filled the sky
You could see that dust storm comin', the cloud looked deathlike black

Dust Bowl Refugee
'Cross the mountains to the sea,
Come the wife and kids and me.
It's a hot old dusty highway
For a dust bowl refugee.

Black migration from the South to the cities of the North was on an even greater scale and over a longer period. Between 1900 and 1970 more than seven million were motivated by a desire to escape oppressive Jim Crow racism and by better economic prospects, the availability of jobs, the perception that the future would contain greater freedom and prosperity.

Lewis and Clark, and the internal migrations of the 20th century, exemplify ambiguities that permeate American journeys that are found on the road. But, of course, none of this is unique to America. Voluntary and involuntary mobility runs through global histories. Motivations are rarely single or simple but combine some sense of going towards or escaping from, the unfamiliar towards which you travel and the familiar places you leave. This offers reflective space in which "Where are you going?" and "Why are you going there?" become more complex questions, not conducive to simple answers.

All of which leads back towards the heartland of America and two inconsequential towns found along Highway 83. Holcomb and Liberal represent two ends of a spectrum. In one, corrupted dreams of wealth lead to violence and nightmares. From the other, a yellow brick road offers a winding pathway towards some form of enlightenment. The darkness and the light coexist. We arrive at a place we had not anticipated.

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Endnotes

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