My relatives in Iowa sent me a recent issue of the Oskaloosa Herald with front-page coverage of nearby Pella, Iowa's annual Tulip Festival noting that this year, because of the peculiar weather, all the tulips had bloomed early and were gone by the time of the Spring Festival.
Last year my partner and I spent a week at a motel attached to a golf resort in the middle of cornfields in central Iowa. We had visited Pella, a pleasant little Dutch town nearby, with a population of about 10,000, and two industries, a paint manufacturer and a window company on the outskirts of town. In town, the local "industries" are retirees and a mini-tourist trade. Pella has a picturesque town square, with a tulip tower and a windmill. Nearby, in a small plaza, is a glochenspiel with life-sized figures of historical townspeople that come out every other hour as the clock strikes. A 19th century Opera House and other restored buildings ring the square. Nearby, an "historic village" has been recreated with early town structures and a mill. Sometimes called the bologna capital of the world, Pella is known for its great smoked sausage and its tulip festival. It's always a clean little town, but in spring the natives in Dutch costumes get out and scrub the streets, parade a festival queen, and display dozens of parks usually overflowing with hundreds of thousands of beautiful multi-colored tulips.
But that's about the only color in Pella; or Oskaloosa for that matter. I visited relatives in both these towns. When I was growing up, I spent my summers on my grandparents' farm at five-point outside of Osakloosa. The town had originally been called Carbona, for the coal mines in the area. My people were miners first, then settled into farming and strip mining for surface coal when the deep pits ran out.
Oskaloosa was named after the daughter of Mahaska, a chief of the Iowas, and namesake for the county. His statute standing in the town square is the only Native American for miles ( there is an "Indian Reservation" at nearby Tama ) . In our week in Iowa we saw many happy, well-scrubbed children at play, while beaming parents looked on. In Pella, old timers, male and female, volunteered at the historic village, worked in the garden clubs, volunteered at the book sale for the library, and generally made the town hospitable. We saw one African-American couple checking in with a golf-outing party as we left our motel. Oh yes, we saw an African-American man with a "white" woman at a restaurant in South Amana on the way home. Three people "of color," startling in their singularity, in one week from border to border.
While at the courthouse in Oskaloosa doing some genealogical research, I came across A History of Mahaska County. I read that in the mid-1880s miners went on strike against the successors of Consolidated Coal, who had drastically changed their payment policy. I noted ( p. 200 ) that Hobe Armstorng "a mulatto of exceptional ability, a natural leader in his dealings with the public" who had gotten rich running a meat market that catered to miners in Mahaska County, went to Virginia and brought back "colored miners" as strike breakers. Hobe had run a three-day festival on his farm every year that "drew crowds from far and near, whites as well as blacks, a better drawing card than the Mahaska County Fair." The county noted one "colored church" of 200 people.
By 1900 a "Negro town" grew up, founded by an African-American pharmacist, Benjamin Franklin Cooper. In addition to a variety of merchants, a doctor, and a dance hall, Cooperstown had a "Negro band" of 18 members drawn from local clubs ( HMC, p.256 ) . The Cooper Dance Hall and roller skating rink were also used by the white population of adjacent Buxton; "the races, however, did not mix, they held their events on separate nights." I don't know the fate of the town. The book noted at least two "disastrous fires" in the years before the First World War.
We did see three lesbian couples in Pella, the pair in our motel gave us a "gaydar" check; and there was an obviously gay male customer at the shop where we stocked up on sausage to bring back for Chicago friends. There are a number of antique malls in the area; near one, the two gay male couples we encountered looked right through us. My 80-year-old aunt in Oskaloosa told us about the "colored doctor" she had in Des Moines, who came out to the waiting room and talked to her, and treated her so nice, not like the white doctors. We didn't know whether to hug her or hit her; the only other "colored folks" she ever remembered seeing in her life were in Chicago when she visited my mom for a few weeks after her marriage in 1938. When we returned home, passing the houses of our block-neighbors: Chinese, Latino, African-American, Polish, Italian, Bohemian, Filipino, Catholic, Protestant. Muslim—and two lesbian households—I decided I could forgive Oak Park a multitude of sins.
Copyright Marie Kuda 2000.
