Happy Birthday Loving Chapel

In a day and age when church planners specialize in Modified Morton Building and Butt-Ugly Big-Box, spotting a jolly and welcoming old-timer like Loving Chapel United Methodist Church lifts the spirits.

The building --- located at the intersection of Highways 2 and 65 in Leon, celebrates its 120th birthday this year, providing you start counting from the year inscribed above the front door, although it was not dedicated until the 17th of March 1889.

It's a lovely name for a church, too --- and appropriate for a congregation that was organized on the 14th of February 1851.

But the truth of the matter is, the building was named to honor "Uncle" Billy and "Aunt" Betty Loving, whose $5,000 gift matched $5,000 already raised by parishioners and enabled construction, debt-free, of a church that ended up costing $12,000. Although you get so involved admiring the detail you'd hardly notice, the building is in the shape of a Greek cross designed originally with a large Sunday school room and transepts that could be closed off with sliding doors.

The jaunty bell tower is my favorite feature of a building that obviously still is loved by its congregation which has done a good job of preserving Loving Chapel's friendly spirit.

Slave, or free?

Dudley Mathis's grave is located in the center of this photo, looking southwest across the oldest part of Hamilton Cemetery. The Hamilton graves are to the right, under the oak tree.

It seems odd, but not surprising I guess, that so many white Americans are so surprised that black Americans are still mad. Why can’t those folks just get over 250 years of slavery, another century of legally-sanctioned apartheid, violence and discrimination and the last 50 years or so of racism sometimes more subtle --- and sometimes not? Golly.

Shock, let me say shock again, when it became clear that some of that anger has bubbled to the surface occasionally as Barack Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, preached from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

“… now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost," he said after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

“God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human,” he said in a 2003 sermon.

"Barack knows what it means to be a black man to be living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people. Hillary can never know that. Hillary ain't never been called a nigger," he said during December.

Shocking --- or is it?

I remember angry white men preaching from other pulpits after Sept. 11, declaring the terrorist attacks to be God’s judgment for what they perceived to be the nation’s sins.

I’ve heard lately from various pulpits white and black that God will damn America if, let’s say, same-sex civil unions or marriages are tolerated.

And what about it? You ever been called “nigger,” or its equivalent based solely on your race, religion, ethnic background or sexual orientation?

These are some of the things I was thinking about last week when I stopped at Hamilton Cemetery just north of Pleasanton in Decatur County to visit the grave of Dudley J. S. Mathis, brought to Iowa as a slave in 1846.

THE INSCRIPTION on Dudley’s tombstone, topped by a hand pointing skyward and surrounded by the words “There’s rest in heaven,” reads, “Sacred to the memory of Dudley J. S. Mathis, Died Nov. 8, 1849, Aged 28 Yrs.”

Dudley’s story is frustratingly incomplete. I’ve been unable to find little more than the inscription on the newer tombstone nearby of his owners, William (Sept. 1, 1801-Sept. 17, 1854) and Susannah Willis (Sept. 22, 1800-Nov. 22, 1869) Hamilton.

This stone, erected many years later by Ralph Hamilton, descendant of William and Susannah, reads, “William Hamilton and family came to Pleasanton in the 1840’s with six slave families, including a slave named Dudley Mathis. Dudley Mathis was the first person buried in the cemetery. He died at the age of 28 in 1849. Hamilton Cemetery was named after William Hamilton as was Hamilton Township.”

WE KNOW that the Hamiltons originated in Grainger County, Tennessee, and that may have been where Dudley was born, too.

Most of the Hamilton children were born in Tennessee, but the obituary of their 13th child, Francis Marion Hamilton, states that he was born Aug. 15, 1845, in Platte County, Missouri, so we also know that the family lived there before moving farther north. The obituary of a Hamilton daughter, Arvesta Ann Hamilton Stone, states that the family arrived in the Pleasanton area during 1846.

Hard to believe there were slaves in Iowa in 1846, year of statehood, so you need to know something about the history of the extreme southern part of the state to understand why more than a few slave-owning families, including the Hamiltons, located there.

The current Iowa-Missouri border follows what is known as the Sullivan Line, surveyed by J.S. Sullivan in 1816 before either Missouri or Iowa had been granted statehood. By the time Iowa became a territory in 1838, confusion had developed.

First of all, Sullivan had made a surveying error that caused his line, which was supposed to be more or less straight from northwest Missouri to the Mississippi River, to drift slightly northeast from true as it approached the Mississippi. And there were other problems.

During the late 1830s, Albert M. Lea, formerly a U.S. Army cartographer, was named chairman of the Iowa-Missouri Border Commission, a group named to sort the border dispute out. He spelled out four possibilities to choose from: (1) the original Sullivan Line, (2) the Sullivan Line as it should have been surveyed in the first place, (3) the Joseph C. Brown line, based on an 1837 survey commissioned by Missouri that cut across Iowa from river to river about nine miles north of the Sullivan Line and (4) another line, optimistically embraced by Iowa, that passed from river to river a few miles south of the Sullivan line.

To add interest, Missouri and Iowa militias almost got into a fight about the border during 1839, when the abortive “Honey War” was almost launched.

Finally, in 1849, the U.S. Supreme court decided that the original Sullivan Line, despite its flaw, would be the permanent border between the two states.

But during the 1840s, there was a good deal of confusion about exactly which state these southern-most miles of Iowa were in. Missouri was a slave state and Iowa, free. A number of slave-owning families, including the Hamiltons, moved into the disputed territory in the belief that their new homes were in Missouri.

So that was why Dudley Mathis and other men and women the Hamiltons may have claimed legal title to were brought into Iowa as slaves.

And it isn’t clear if the Hamiltons freed their slaves, including Dudley, or if the slaves freed themselves. Nor is it clear if Dudley was considered slave or free when he died, although lore suggests that he was a freed slave who chose to remain with the Hamiltons.

WHATEVER THE CASE may be, Dudley, because he was black, slave or free, could not have been a citizen of Iowa, could not have voted, could not have testified in court, could not have married a white woman, could not have been guaranteed a place in an Iowa school, was considered less than fully human by the Iowa Constitution and under Iowa law.

As these things go, Iowa has a fairly solid civil rights record --- when compared to the records of other states, but not perhaps if you are on the black side of the black/white color line.

It was not until 1868, after the Civil War, that Iowa eliminated from its Constitution provisions limiting the right to vote to white people.

Although Iowa’s 1884 law ensuring equal access to specified places of public accommodation was one of the first in the nation, it was very narrowly applied and consistently limited by court rulings. It was not until a 1949 Iowa Supreme Court ruling that Maurice Katz had violated the terms of that 1884 act by refusing to serve Edna Griffin, John Bibbs and Leonard Hudson at his Katz Drugstore in downtown Des Moines that everyday overt acts of discrimination began to wane.

Closer to home, my dad often talked about the involvement of his aunt and uncle, Daisy (Myers) and Durward Ream, in the Ku Klux Klan, so active in Chariton at the time it bought as its headquarters the building now occupied by the Assembly of God Church. And I was startled a few years ago to find in an old obituary regarding a funeral at Belinda Christian Church, considered a family congregation, reference to the fact that the services had been conducted under the auspices of the “knights and ladies” of the Klan.

Dad also talked about the only black member of his 1930s high school graduating class in Chariton, a lovely and intelligent young woman taunted by fellow students as “nigger” who left Lucas County upon graduation and never returned.

I SAT DOWN the other night to read the transcript of Obama’s eloquent speech delivered on Tuesday in large part because of the controversy surrounding Wright’s remarks.

After distancing himself from the remarks, the candidate added that despite the fact he deplored the words, he could no more disown Wright than he could the nation’s black community --- and that he understood the sources of their anger.

“ … race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.” Obama continued. “We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

“The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together …”

THERE ARE MANY more things I’d like to know about Dudley J.S. Mathis. His tombstone is an especially fine one for its time, beautifully engraved slate both larger and far better preserved than the nearby eroding marble monuments to members of the Hamilton family. Who ensured that he was memorialized so well?

His grave is in the center of a broad open area in the middle of the oldest section of the Hamilton Cemetery. Why so much space for himself? Why is no one buried near him? Because he was black?

The grave has received careful attention in the past. At some point probably many years after his death, concrete curbing, now shattered by time, was placed around it. By whom?

And finally, there’s the inscription in its lower right hand corner, made enigmatic by time and lichen. Two of the words engraved next to an incised heart seem to read “Stop hate” and I simply can’t decipher the rest. It’s entirely possible this is not at all the proper interpretation and perhaps one day I’ll go back with a gentle brush, equipped to make a rubbing, and see if I can do a better job of interpreting it. But it seemed a good message to take away from Dudley’s grave on Friday.

It has to begin, I think, with white people, with understanding about the sources of black anger and with attempts to channel whatever anger we may have ourselves onto constructive paths. When we've done that, we can begin to talk to black people about their anger.

But until we stop hate, we’re all slaves, none of us free.

Hormones

A week away from Mason City and a half hour or more of NBC’s “Today” show each morning have turned my thoughts to adultery.

Interesting stuff, and I’d have watched more of Meredith and Matt, but a Des Moines hospital took to running animated advertisements for colon surgery. I don’t care if this does involve just three small incisions --- don’t want to see large intestines being snipped, clipped and ripped over breakfast. Reading‘s better for the digestion.

Oh, and I wasn’t thinking of committing, just of adultery as the possible basis for a new reality TV show --- and of hormones and the presidency.

Thinking back to notable adulterers --- and these are only the ones who come readily to mind:

Bill Clinton, the highest-ranking known adulterer in recent history.

The Rev. Ted Haggard and his male prostitute, Mike Jones.

The thwarted 2007 attempt of Idaho’s senior U.S. senator, Larry Craig, to hook up in a Minnesota restroom with a guy who unfortunately (for Craig) turned out to be a cop (that counts, just for effort, as half an adultery).

And what a wealth of adulters the last couple weeks produced, all spread out in living color on the “Today” show.

First New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and his high-priced prostitutes. Come right down to it, Spitzer’s adultery was not half so surprising to an Iowan as the fact that he had committed it so expensively --- $1,000 an hour, up to $80,000 over the years. Land sakes alive!

Then just as soon as Spitzer resigns and his successor, David Paterson, is sworn in, both Paterson and his wife, Michelle, announce to the world that they’d both committed adultery, in his case serial adultery, during a “rough spot” in their marriage several years ago. Heavens to Betsy !

And on Tuesday, New Jersey’s McGreeveys crawl out from under their rocks.

You may remember Jim McGreevey, governor of New Jersey at the time, who announced in 2004 that he was a “gay American man.” He and his ex-wife, now Dina Matos, have been dueling ever since and he’s attending an Episcopal seminary in New York --- the high church equivalent to an evangelical caught with his pants down who, while zipping up, announces that he’s been born again.

Anyhow, after Dina Matos appeared one morning last week on the “Today” show to give her insights into the adultery of Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson, out of the woodwork comes a former McGreevey aide, Ted Pedersen, alleging he and the ex-Mrs. McGreevey had a long history of sexual relations --- with Governor Jim as the audience. Land o’ Goshen!

Now I figure that on the raging hormones scale you get 10 points for full-fledged adultery and five points for alleged or thwarted.

So Bill Clinton and Haggard get 10 each and Craig, 5.

Moving on, it’s 10 points for Spitzer, 10 points each for both David and Michelle Paterson, 10 points for McGreevey for his original indiscretions and 5 points each for Jim, his ex-wife and the aide for the new allegations.

If I’ve got this figured out right, the men are ahead of the women 65 points to 15.

If you wonder where I’m going with this --- Hillary Rodham Clinton for president!

Good old boys used to claim women were unfit for leadership because of their hormones, but ya know that argument wasn’t valid then and I’ve just proved that it surely isn’t now. Honest I have.

And I don’t think we can afford any more raging male hormones in the White House right now (ponder George W. Bush, testosterone and the war in Iraq).

So as much as I relish the thought of Barack and Michelle Obama in the White House, I’ve got to go with the only hormonally safe choice.

The first photo atop this entry is Eliot Spitzer; the second, David Paterson.

The River Queen

We like to read about ourselves here in Iowa, maybe in search of a collective sense of who we are. This was the West, after all, before West went west --- and now we’re Midwest, not that that makes much sense. We’re in the middle of a continent, not the West as presently defined. Eastwest’s more like it, but that’s not likely to catch on.

It’s fairly well agreed, however, that the West begins to begin at the Mississippi River, Iowa’s east coast; and when Mary Morris promised a trip down the river from La Crosse, Wisc., to River Mile 0 at Cairo, Ill., aboard a vintage houseboat called Friend Ship (brand name River Queen) I bought into it.

“River Queen” is part travelogue, and a good one, but it’s a book that weaves multiple strands skillfully to become quite a bit more.

Morris’s father, Sol H. Morris, had died at 102 a few months before the trip began. Some of the early years of his life, spent mostly in Chicago, were lived in Hannibal on the Mississippi in a house next door to the boyhood home of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain).

So the trip was partly a geographic exploration of an aspect of his life, but beyond that an attempt come to terms with a complex father-daughter relationship.

Sol Morris was a beloved father, but also an abusive one --- not physically, but because of an ungoverned and poisonous temper driven with words like spears into those closest to him. Reconciliation becomes one of the strongest threads in “River Queen.”

Morris traveled downriver with two men from La Crosse, Jerry Nelson, dour owner/captain of Friend Ship, and Tom Hafner, his more outgoing first officer --- a man more “married” in a non-threatening sort of way to his little dog Samantha Jean than he was to his girlfriend (Tom signed on for the trip in part to give Samantha Jean a little vacation and himself more quality time to spend with her).

Watching the relationship between these four --- woman, two men and small dog --- blossom into friendship aboard the Friend Ship is the loveliest aspect of “River Queen,” another thread skillfully woven in.

Then there’s the river itself --- made navigable by the Army Corps of Engineers with marked channels and an elaborate systems of locks and dams --- but still the most powerful, cantankerous, romantic and violent character that Morris writes about. Her descriptions of the Mississippi often are lyrical and occasionally terrifying.

Morris gives Iowa generally good press as Friend Ship passes downriver at 8 mph --- Guttenberg, Dubuque, Bellevue, Clinton, Davenport, Muscatine, Keokuk --- although Davenport fares best because of Morris’s affection for jazz legend Bix Beiderbecke.

Iowans sometimes amuse themselves by watching non-Iowans like Morris (born in Chicago, she has traveled and written about the world and now lives in Brooklyn) stumble around --- and there’s some of that, too, in “River Queen.” Consider lunch in in Bellevue:

“When I walk into the Richmond Café, the music video to ‘Mississippi Girl’ is playing. I see two gay guys sitting having lunch. This wouldn’t surprise me, of course, in New York, but it does in Bellevue, Iowa. In fact it looks as if the whole restaurant is filled with guys right out of Brokeback Mountain eating burgers and fries. At least I think they are gay. Then I realize that the two men I first spotted are both wearing the same sleeveless T’s with the name of the cement company they work for across the front.

“All the men in the restaurant are in uniforms bearing names like ‘True Value,’ ‘Tacky Jack’s Sure Wax’ and ‘Professional Rescue Innovators.’ All the women are wearing rhinestone crosses and taking their mothers to lunch. Everyone in the Richmond Café is either in a company uniform or wearing a rhinestone cross or both. And now I’m pretty sure no one is gay.”

And this:

"As I head back to the boat down a side street, a freight train passes me so slowly that I can reach out and touch it. The engineer waves. I wave back. I find this river custom so quaint, yet so odd at the same time. I try to imagine waving at bus drivers, at subway conductors, at strangers on the street. But here we just wave and wave.”

How quaint that Morris would think this quaint.

Sorry to report that Nauvoo, Mormon Disney World on the Illinois side of the Mississippi, creeped Morris out. But she and Jerry approached it on foot from the river after mooring at a grain elevator --- so you can see why. The Saints have accomplished wonderful things while restoring their former home, but they have not succeeded in rehitching a town that fled to the bluffs after they left in the 1840s to the river that birthed it. The effect is odd, even creepy, when you’re not used to it.

Morris’s discovery in Hannibal of an old photo showing the now-demolished house her father had once lived it moved her greatly, but Hannibal itself did not --- frozen and frosted Mark Twain molded into a sticky mouse trap for aging tourists. And not a sign in this former slave state of Twain’s black Jim, Morris notes.

Finally, after a brief trip into ghostly Cairo after a turn up the Ohio, then beyond Paducah a turn down the Tennessee to Kentucky Lake, the trip ends at Friend Ship’s new permanent mooring.

I started reading on a Sunday afternoon and after several breaks finished “River Queen” late Monday afternoon --- and wanted more. It’s that kind of book.

Mary Morris’s “River Queen,” published 2007 by Henry Holt & Co., is available in hardback for approximately $24.

Morris, who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, also is the author of “Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone,” “Wall to Wall: From Beijing to Berlin by Rail” and several other books.

Bluegrass homily

I take time out from the Anglican wars sometimes to follow the Roman, in St. Louis and elsewhere, now St. Paul courtesy of a favorite blog, Wild Reed.

A frustrating business, but as a veteran of the guerrilla church --- unarmed raids at the altar rails of unsuspecting congregations when the need for the Eucharist arises --- now back home among Episcopalians, I‘m better at taking comfort where I find it than I used to be

I’m also a fan of bluegrass (don’t worry if you’re not; it’s an acquired taste and it takes perseverance) --- great traveling music, though.

Sunday morning after the 8 a.m. Rite I Eucharist at St. John’s here (designed originally for Episcopalians whose ears prefer traditional language to the more contemporary Rite II, called Anglican fossils by some, and I don't care --- but I do relish the early-morning hour and the music of silence), I headed three hours south listening to The Del McCoury Band’s “The Promise Land,” and found another homily in Mary Beth Cordle’s “Sit Down With Jesus.”

Here are some of the lyrics (you’re on your own so far as close harmony, nasal twang, guitar, mandolin, banjo, fiddle and bass fiddle are concerned):

Jesus was a man who liked to sit down with his friends,
Break bread and share good conversation,
He made no distinction of status or of station,
Just extended an open invitation.

And the chorus:

The table’s spread,
Jesus wants to sit and eat with us.
Spend some time (Zaccheus was a changed man after lunch)

Come on in
To a feast prepared for all to share
You don’t need a reservation, just pull up a chair

Something to think about, I thought, in a day and age of renaissance for those who’d like to slam the barn door and bar it in the Anglican, Roman and other traditions before all the sheep come home safe from pasture.

You don't need a reservation, just pull up a chair ...

Can I hear it from the amen corner?

Ancient faces: Jessie and Ida

Or subtitle this, how about them hats? This is a favorite photograph of my grandmother, Jessie Frances (Brown) Miller (left) and her niece, Ida Belle (Brown) Rogers, all dressed up in their Sunday-go-to-meeting best.

Jessie, who was born 19 January 1875 in Columbia, Marion County, Iowa, died on the 7th of January, 1945, before I was born --- and not knowing her is a regret. Her father, Joseph Brown, was 65 when she was born and so this is one of those families where time plays tricks and nieces and nephews end up older than their uncles and aunts. Jessie's mother, my great-grandmother, was Chloe (Boswell) Prentiss/Brown, Joseph Brown's third wife.

Ida Belle, born 15 April 1874 at Cincinnati in Appanoose County, Iowa, was a daughter of Jessie's half-brother, Archibald Steele Brown Jr., who was more than 30 years older, and is wife, Rebecca Brown (yes, she was a Brown, too, although of an unrelated family). Archie, a Civil War veteran, died when Ida was two and so she was raised by her mother and step-father, John Alden Corder, a major mover and shaker at that time in Appanoose County and by all accounts a kindly step-parent.

Although they lived some distance apart, Jessie and Ida were the best of friends --- a relationship that continued until Ida's death.

Ida married James Gallett Rogers on 22 July 1894 in Appanoose County and they settled down on a farm near Moulton. Eleven years later, on 3 July 1905, Jessie married my grandfather, William Ambrose Miller, and settled down on the farm in English Township, Lucas County, where the rest of her life was spent.

Not long after Jessie and Will were married, Ida and her family relocated to a homestead near Midland in Haakon County, South Dakota. Ida did not like South Dakota, not at all --- and expressed that sentiment frequently in correspondence with Grandmother Jessie. She agreed to live there, however, but made Jim promise that if she died there he'd return her body to Iowa for burial.

Sadly, Ida died too soon in South Dakota, on the 8th of March, 1919, just before her 45th birthday --- and the promise was kept. Both Ida and Jim are buried in the cemetery just west of Moulton.

But of course when this photo was taken, probably during the early 1890s, all of this was in the future and it was a happy time captured in this photograph for us to look at now and smile about.