Twixt Eden and Gethsemane: Notes on Contaminants of Concern in Wichita, Kansas by Jeromiah Taylor

When you walk along the path, it curves slowly to the right, turning out of view only just before the horizon line. Trees line both sides, and they grow, like all trees on the plains, along a stream and out from a ravine. You are standing at the 13th street “pause zone” of the Redbud Trail. A 15 mile trail that runs from North Wichita, all the way East to Augusta. The trail occupies a former BNSF railway, now paved. To your left is the MacDonald Golf Course. To your right is the back edge of the Maple Grove Cemetery, where I have spent hours, and to where I return often. Maple Grove is a place where I can see a supercut of myself growing up; aging in fast-forward. As if what draws me there besides the beauty, is a sense that I will one day end up somewhere similar and I ought to familiarize myself now. Once, when I was about 10, my grandmother and I walked the cemetery, trying to decipher the oldest headstones, weathered and moss-covered as they were. The seasoned granite squares were still legible enough to shock us – the people whose names they bore lived such short lives, and there seemed to be too many children. Not all the graves are old, and whenever I visit Maple Grove, there is always a fresh one near the back, just on the other side of the collapsed wire fence separating the cemetery from the Redbud trail. Black rectangles of rich soil, adorned with plastic pinwheels and votives; there still seem to be too many children. 

This portion of the trail is dedicated to the Black History of Wichita; bedecked with plaques sharing most often the word “first.” Hattie McDaniel was born in Wichita, and Chester 

Lewis focused much of his activism in the area. At Ninth and Hillside there is another “pause zone”, consisting of blocks and pillars tiled with historical entries. According to one of the tiles, in 1948, Marion Anderson performed at the Wichita Forum and stayed at the home of Dr. and Mrs. E.J Farmer at 1301 N. Cleveland. The first day I read that tile, I surrendered to the whipping cold, and walked back towards 13th where I was parked. On the way, I searched for Marion Anderson on Spotify. I listened to her rendition of “Crucifixion”, a spiritual set to a piano arrangement by Franz Rupp. The rendition she performed in Austria, where she enchanted the Germans, and was “praised” as the “Negro singer with a white soul.” It’s hard to listen to that performance and think that there is anything white about the soul which conjured it. Anderson’s voice courses with chilly reverence, halting every molecule in reach of its frequency, its very vibration testifying to sorrow, grandeur, and resilience. It is beautiful, simply put, and white only to the extent that whiteness forms the limit of one’s aesthetic imagination. 

The song goes like this:

They crucified my lord, he said not a mumblin’ word. Not a word, not a word, not a word. 

That lyric strikes me as ironic, considering that Jesus famously uttered not one, but seven “final sayings” from the cross. Though the text fails to mention whether he mumbled them. Yet my composite image of Jesus is not that of a man who mumbles. The truth of the song, such as it is, lives in the word “mumblin’”. The truth of Anderson’s rendition lives not in “mumblin’”, but more so inside “word”, which she baptizes in the dark, still, fathoms of her contralto. As if she is telling you a very somber, important secret, which she is not entirely sure that you can handle knowing. 

Not far North of Maple Grove and the Redbud trail, is a residential area, now called the “29th and Grove Contamination Site” by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. Throughout the 1970’s the predominantly black neighborhood was poisoned with what the Kansas Department of Health and Environment is now calling the “contaminant of concern”. The contaminant, a carcinogenic solvent called trichloroethene, leached from the Union Pacific train yard at 29th and Grove, spreading 2.5 miles Southward in a “plume”. Despite a half-hearted public information campaign during the 1990’s, the poisoning was not common knowledge until 2022. The Union Pacific Railroad shares a duopoly with BNSF, who on its own ships enough coal to meet 25% of the United State’s energy needs. And who, on its own, emits, from each train car, more than a million coal particles per second. In the company’s own words, “there are over 250,000 BNSF freight cars on the tracks at any given time”. Aujanae Bennett, a woman who has lived inside Pacific Union’s “plume” since 1968, told The Voice, “I can give you a list of probably, just on my block where I grew up, seven or eight people who died because of kidney cancers or other cancers, including my father”. 

As it turns out, the old idiom “wrong side of the tracks” really does not apply in Wichita. Rather, it is one’s general proximity to train tracks which indicates one’s class position. If trains are remote to your daily life, then you live sufficiently far East or West of reality, though certainly not of Eden. If trains are a daily, almost omnipotent, factor to be negotiated as one tries to drive to work, sleep through blaring horns, or avoid “contaminants of concern”, then you have found yourself in the center; both of the city and of reality. One might say you dwell indefinitely in Gethsemane. In Wichita, the train tracks form the uneasy boundary between those two dissimilar gardens. Whenever I use a train stalled at 29th as an excuse for tardiness, brows furrow, and then follows the question “where do you live”. “Broadway and 28th ” deepens the furrow, as if the listener is struggling to visualize that precise intersection. In all likelihood, they may never have seen it. If met with quick recognition, then a camaraderie is established immediately. If I am met with oh yeah, by the Leeker’s and the Dollar General, I know I am talking to someone with whom I have something to talk about. If not, I change the topic to the weather. Such is class in Wichita, Kansas. 

BNSF itself, is wholly a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, and thus owned in great part  by Warren Buffet. The man up in Omaha, worth $108 billion. Though the billionaire who looms largest in our imagination is fellow Wichitan, Charles Koch, I think of Buffet everyday, when stopped at a light, watching dozens of intermodal shipping containers pass by. Intermodal shipping containers bearing the BNSF logo, almost always obscured by vibrant, and accomplished graffiti. If stalled at Broadway and 21st, I think of the people, two blocks south of me, in the motels, the soup kitchens, and the shelters. The people, who every winter, lose some of their number to death-by-freezing. The people, who among others, die in large numbers of accidental fentanyl overdoses, not in small part because Kansas will not decriminalize fentanyl test strips. If stalled at George Washington Boulevard and Mt. Vernon, I think of C.J Lofton, who died when he was 17 at the nearby Sedgwick County Juvenile Detention Center, after being restrained in the fetal position for 30 minutes. Whichever track I am stuck at, I think always of Buffet, and somewhere in the stentorian drone of the train, I hear his words: “BNSF continues to be the number one artery of American commerce”.  In his 2022 annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, Buffet wrote, “you can be proud of your railroad”. 

BNSF holds in its gut the cadavers of the Atchinson, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad, as well as the Northern Burlington.

Do you remember the song?:

See the old smoke risin’ ’round the bend

I reckon that she knows she’s gonna meet a friend.

Folks ‘round these parts get the time of day

From The Atchison, Topeka And The Santa Fe.

I am unsure of whose friend the railroad is, but it is true that folks ‘round these parts still get the time of day from BNSF, though not in the hourly sense. The train seems always to be moving, sounding in the background as white noise. It seems to stall unpredictably, though always at the worst possible time. Yet it tells a time of its own. It tells us that the world is still turning. That folks not ’round these parts are still buying and selling. Still have need of liquids, gasses, hazardous materials, coal aggregates, and other heavy freight. And so the train keeps on, with its more than “250,000 freight cars on the tracks at any time”, and each of their 1 million coal particles per second. 

It keeps going, past the “29th and Grove Contamination Site”, and through the “21st Street Industrial Corridor ”. Our city’s great scarification; a vast industrial wasteland home to abandoned depots, where driving by at night, one sees specters in the panes. Wichita recently won a $1,000,000 grant from the federal government to study the area’s local economic impact. KSN, reporting on the grant, wrote that “Eight rail tracks are grouped into four crossings in the one mile of 21st Street between Broadway and I-135…According to the Federal Railroad Administration, there are approximately 75 train movements per day, mostly at low speeds at 21st Street.” I wrote “scarification” in reference to ugliness, the literal disruption of time and space. But it is also a scar, or perhaps a still open wound, in another sense. As it divides Wichita’s Latino enclave, El Pueblo, where I live, from the historically black neighborhood of Matlock Heights. Ron Estes, the Kansas Republican Congressman who wrote the grant, said “the 21st Street Corridor runs between two distinct and culturally rich neighborhoods in the city”. “Distinct” is political-speak for “segregated”. As for “culturally rich”, I’m not sure what translation best fits.  What I know: as of 2023 there are 261 “vacant parcels”, as Estes put it, between the train tracks and I-35, which bring “unsafe environments..a lack of transit access, and increased wait times for emergency services”. 

Driving North on I-135, between the corridor and the contamination site, billboards read “MORE MONEY, MORE MONEY, MORE MONEY”,  “JESUS OFFERS NEW LIFE, CALL (33)FOR-TRUTH”, and finally, “HIRING BILLBOARD INSTALLER”:

Two hundred and fifty thousand freight cars at any given time. 

The contaminant of concern.

See that old smoke risin’ ‘round the bend,

I reckon that she knows she’s gonna meet a friend.

MORE MONEY, MORE MONEY, MORE MONEY

CALL (33)FOR-TRUTH

Not a mumblin’ word. Not a word. Not a word. Not a word.

…And elsewhere, behind the fresh graves, I walk the paved scar of BNSF, reading plaques at pause zones, learning which black person was the first to do what, and asking myself, if not Jesus, who dares then to mumble a word?

Jeromiah Taylor is a writer from Wichita, Kansas. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Chicago Review of Books, The Millions, The Los Angeles Review, The New Territory, Lambda Literary, Chautauqua Journal, and others. He is a staff writer at Fauxmoir Lit Mag, and Northwest Review. 

14 March 2024