In 1881, the Kansas Legislature voted a $5000 appropriation for a Home for Friendless Women. Wasn’t that lovely? What do you suppose that was all about? I doubt it was a home for soiled doves, or even women who had gotten themselves in a family way, because society didn’t hesitate to pin brutally accurate labels on people.
I don’t go hunting for these tidbits, I stumble across them while I’m doing research for an academic book I’m writing on 19th century African American politicians. They haunt me, these curious little items buried in Kansas history. They find their way into my mystery novels and stories.
Lottie Albright, my Western Kansas historian specializes in African American history, as I do in real life. She collects family histories for a book about her county, as I once did. Whereas her academic life gets seriously side-tracked by her additional job as a Deputy Sheriff, mine gets derailed by more mundane interventions.
The Lottie Albright series is simultaneously contemporary and historical. A reviewer commented that it was unusual to find a series that features an amateur sleuth and is at the same a police procedural. One of my challenges is integrating the cold case plot into the present so that the old murders are causing new ones. It’s the universal dilemma of Pandora’s Box. Once family secrets are out, it’s too late to shove them back.
So how did I find myself wallowing in this complexity? I think it’s because I’m a native Kansan, who grew up in a very small town. Most of the merchants who have retail stores are fierce multi-taskers with additional occupations. For instance, in my home town, our undertaker is also our CPA. Our only computer store also sold doilies and Malaluka Oil.
From infancy, we learn that we expected to do it all—go out for a sport, be in the school play, and sew our own costumes. A peculiarly brave mentality develops because competency is never an issue. No one cares that you can’t run, can’t act, and have never sewn. Participation is mandatory so the school can field a football team, and cast the current year’s dramatic production , looking half-way appropriate while we’re at it.
What’s essential is getting job done. That attitude sustains me in the middle of books that seem to have unnecessarily entangled plots. The Kansas state motto is Ad Astra Per Aspera—Through the Stars Through Difficulties.
Unfortunately, we Kansans are also conditioned to believe if it’s not hard, it doesn’t count.
