We Came to Find Home

There’s over 100 hours put into the design and painting of Confluence—#my5footheart. It was an experience of a lifetime. A huge challenge. An amazing learning experience. A deeply, spiritual, meaningful and reflective path. The official title, Confluence: Where Many Paths Found Home. It’s the story of all of us. All our families who traveled here in there many different ways, at different times in history, across the trails, down the rivers, to find their way here—this place called Kansas City. At one point or another, all of us came here to find and build home. We may stay for generations, and many of us have, or leave and return when it’s time to care for our elders, like I did. We may come for a job and end up building a life — or leaving a couple years later to explore some other place. We may come for school and decide we want to raise a family here. Our parents may have come here, like mine did, to create a better life for themselves. So many do now, from all over. I smile as I drive past my grandfather’s apartment where he grew up on Belmont in the old Northeast, the area, still a haven for diversity and community, but perhaps in different ways than in 1923. Healing House has created amazing community in the Northeast to provide services, sober living, community centers and employment centers in literally blocks of the area, rebuilding it from blight. It’s a shining light of hope for many. Artists, as we do, have laid claim to Pendelton Heights, creating not only places to foster imagination and drink good coffee, but building community too. My old dentist, Dr. Ed Kenndrick, an anchor on Independence Avenue, has been providing dental services to people living in the area for decades. Going east, towards 435, you have what used to be my dad’s employer for 30 years, the old Armco Steel buildings, that now have new life from the desolate, gutted abadoned steel mill it was after it closed. Going south down the highway, you drive by the stadiums and right behind them, is Skiles Street, where my granmother and grandfather made their life, on a steep hill in a tiny white house filled with love. They grew tomatoes in the back and fed the birds religiously. They knew every neighbor on their street and grandma and her best friend Betty, would sit on the stoop outside her house and smoke a cigarette (she’d sneek one) while listening to the roar of the crowd at the stadium or the organ at the K, and her AM radio beside them to hear the calls of the games.

My German grandfather had come at 12 years old on the last boat that was allowed out before quotas began on how many German’s could come to Ellis Island. His father had come to Kansas City a year prior, through a sponsor and set up home in that apartment on Belmont. My German great grandmother came that year, 1923, afraid, with 2 children, one just a toddler, and a large chest, a china hutch and their personal belongings. They had traded first class tickets for an earlier boat to America, in fear they wouldn’t make it out. The tickets were third class and in the bottom of the boat. My mom tells the story of how my great greandmother accidentally lost control over the chest that she was trying to get up the plank and it fell into the water. That chest had all their money in the world and all their posessions in it. Several men saw it and jumped in after it, getting all the money and items back into the chest for her and taking it to where it needed to be. I’d like to think that here in Kansas City, we have a lot of folks that would have done the same thing—more than those that wouldn’t have. She processed through Ellis Island with my great aunt and my grandpa Henry, “Heinz”, and when they arrived in Kansas City, began to create home.

The Hamburg Passanger List from my grandfather’s immigration to Ellis Island.

My grandfather spoke very little English, if any. There were no such thing as ESL classes or bilingual classrooms then and so the KCMO school district had him go to every grade to learn English. His first day of school, as a 12 year old, he was put in kindergarten. She says that he spent about 2 weeks there, learning language and then went up to first grade, then second…. and that it took about all year for him to get to the grade he was supposed to be in. That’s pretty impressive I think. As a former bilingual teacher, many people assume that just because you don’t speak English that you are ignorant, when really, the ability to be bilingual, speak and communicate in 2 different languages, is actually a high intelligence trait. Just saying.

He went to Northeast High School where he created the famous Viking mascot, a first of what would become many in a career as a fine arts illustrator with Vile Goller Fine Arts. Art was in his blood. His father an architect, his father an engineer, his mother a painter and knew the fine arts of tatting and fibers as was taught in finishing schools in Europe. He decided to enter contests that were held each week by the KC Star. It was a contest encouraging budding artists to design movie posters to advertise upcoming films. My grandfather one many times. My aunt Chris still has the greyscale acrylics of the prototypes he did for those. Not being able to afford KCAI, he did the next best thing and took continuing education classes there in figure drawing. I learned from his old books from the 1920’s and 30’s and his drawings from when he passed away. As someone who was never a realist and always working in abstraction, the challenge of learning figure drawing was rewarding and it made me feel closer to him than I ever did after he died. I followed his path to KCAI and earned a certificate in fine art from the continuing education division decades later, when I was an art teacher.

When we went through his files that he took with him when he retired in the 70’s from Vile Goller, his reference files for drawings, vellum tracings of ideas, images, mock ups, old greeting card prototypes for the owners, chiefs promotional items, a zillion different manufacturer liquor labels, and tons of magazine images helped me get to know him better too. He never talked about his art. The one time I remember him ever producing any art that I could see was one Christmas when he created this amazing illustration on an envelope that was full of cash for my grandma to go shopping with. She was so delighted. Before the end of his time, he’d talk about his life in Halle and how they saw Hitler’s rise and the fear of his power, of fox hunting, of the bakery that my great grandmother’s famiy owned and before the collapse of The Wall, he’d talk about, on occasion, family that was stuck behind it, there attempts to get across it and how they would never be able to escape. He’d read their letters written in German. He had to explain during the war how they wanted out too and how just because he was German, he was not a Nazi. Very far from it.

Berlin Wall

He met my grandmother on one of her visits up to Kansas City to see friends. She was living in the homestead that her father created in southern Missouri, in a little tiny town that was just her families, called Hattie. It was near the Jack’s Fork River in between Willow Springs and Mountain Grove. Her mother, Gladys, who has Osage, Eastern Cherokee and Quaker ancestry, had traveled with her family for two generations into Indian Country in Kansas, working on farms outside Council Grove, Emporia, Pamona, and Emporia from North Carolina and Kentucky. In 1908 she married William, whose lineage was Anishinnabe. I often refer to the tribe as Ottawa/Ojibwe because on the rolls they are noted as the Rolls of the Ottawa and Chippewa (Ojibwe) and were known to intermix. He was Grand River Band by blood line and had come to Missouri when it began homesteading to claim land again, never letting people know his true heritage. Missouri was a shoot Indian on site state then. He became postmaster and when he died, my great grandma Gladys took over, sorting the mail in the boxes for the small amount of residents that it had grown to from her bedroom. My grandma Angie, the sports lover who lived behind the stadiums, grew up there in the middle of the rolling hills of the Ozarks. She was a country girl who loved the movies and had the figure and look of a pinup. My grandfather took note of that when he met her, and one thing led to another, where she moved to Kansas City to find work and make a life. She found my grandfather Henry (he liked to be called Heinz), or he found her, and in that, they built home, family and a full life, with three daughters, three grandchildren, and 2 great grandchildren.

My dad, mom, one of her sisters sisters and family friends, 1966.

One day, when I was in college, my mother and I were visiting them, they were well into their late 70’s, maybe early 80’s. The topic came up about stories of their histories growing up, and that is when she spoke about her Native history. She did not know much because they were constantly hiding it and her parents had learn to avoid it all together given the atrocities of their people and the blinding of her grandmother. She remembered that Osage was from her mother’s side and Cherokee as well. Everyone’s got a little Cherokee in them is the joke that a lot of what people call “wanna be’s” toss out. But ours is documented on the Dawes rolls. She never knew about her father’s history or lineage. About how he and his father came to claim land in Missouri to reclaim what had been taken from their parents in history. It was found when I started geneological research back in 2003. The names in the mission books. The rolls. The birth certificates. It explained a lot to all of us and for me, it’s been a lifelong quest to learn more and understand. I’d left KC for the West and found myself, literally and metaphorically, in Denver, running from trauma into more in the Mile Hi City. I made a life, a career, and ran away from a lot of stuff. I changed my name, which broke the heart of my grandmother and she swore that she would never call me by “that name”, Jessica. I did it for reasons that I never told them while they were alive because those things would have broken their hearts even more and honestly, I couldn’t handle listening to them or repeating them. I came back, up and down I-70, cats in tow, more than once in 25 years. Once after my grandfather died, another when my beloved aunt was on hospice, and finally in 2011 where I “ended up” here after yet another school violence incident that I had experienced. My time in Denver was marred by Columbine and more. In 2011 when I was screaming for my lifeline and numb from seemingly constant trauma, I ran home, trying to teach art, but scared of every corner of the classroom and parking lot. I left teaching art that time, because I had to, not because of some scandal, but because I was broken. I could not handle, literally, one more drill, one more violent episode from a relationship. I fell apart. Where do you go when you fall apart? The place it all started? The time I took to heal was long. Medication had rendered me without the ability to think creatively, even though in the early years I tried with expressive art and making a couple of albums. It also had made me suicidal, but I told no one, knowing, trained counseling what that meant. I did however find the courage to tell my mental health team I needed something different because things were getting bad. They tried a new medication, and for the first time in 3 years, I felt like I was me again. A cloud lifted. I became a fighter to get my life back instead of a sedated zombie loosing every ounce of creativity I had. I was determined to get my creativity back and develop new pathways in my brain to heal the damage. So I went to KCAI and dove into taking as many continuing education art courses as I could. It was very difficult at first because I had lost all of the ability to visualize and think is fluid ways that I once had. But I was determine, like Rocky prepping for a fight, I dove into screenprinting, watercolor collage and landscapes. Art not only saved by life but recessitated it.

I slowly eased back into teaching and then dove into the most violent school environment Id experienced on a day to day basis in a small suburb outside KC. There I was able to use my expressive arts therapy training everyday, multiple times a day. I ended up hyperfocusing on clinical trauma treatment and mindfulness practices and when the pandemic hit, I was ready to move into mental health counseling again, cleared by my psychologist and psychiatrist. My dad had dementia and had gotten sick one February day in 2017. 2 days later he walked into St. Lukes and never walked out. I became my mom’s backbone and foundation, as she struggled with the demands of a small farm property and is disabled. We sold the property, said goodbye to the old, and moved into a new era. This time, creating our home, just her and myself, how we wanted it and for the first time being able to put up Christmas lights outside, something she always wanted to do those 51 years at the old house (thanks Rich).

Me and my grandma Angie, 1971

Each of our stories are different. Some are traumatic and less romanticised. Others are the things movies are made of. And then there are the ones that are in the middle. Like we are. In the heartland of the midwest, creating home, family and community. It took me running like hell from KC, to running like hell back to it, to discover new ways of seeing, healing and understanding. After 12 years of being back, I finally call KC home again and there are things I so love about this place… Union Station, the Art Deco architecture and plaster elements, Northtowne, the diversity, the history of the Underground Railroad at Quindero, Garozzo’s Downtown and the history of the original River Quay and Columbus Park, UMKC’s Conservatory of Music, where I started out as a vocal performance major (a high school dream come true), first concerts at Kemper Arena, the Nelson’s marble columns, memories of the old Northeast, going to V’s for anniversary’s and birthdays and Cool Crest with my aunt, great Vietnamese food, watching the river at English Landing Park, the fireworks, how we honor our Veterans, remembering the Orient Express as I drive by WOF on 435, the stadiums, watching my first baseball game in the nosebleed section with a cotton candy, exploratory faith journeys that lead to all kinds of places, watching the Chiefs win their first Super Bowl in 50 years, and my youth group friends.… lifelong friends. Most of us left and yep, came back. They’ve expanded my Kansas City nostalgia and love through introducing me to the Overland Park Arboretum and Deanna Rose Farmstead (I mean who can resist the baby goats?). I have gotten to see the city for a bit through new eyes too. New perspectives in culture, race, socioeconomics, fear and the realities for many different types of people in our city. We all meet here, at the confluence of the rivers and trails, of people and history, in the heart of America, in the middle of Turtle Island (North America). In Kansas City.