Flyin' West

“Ain’t nothin’ good to no white folks once a bunch of colored folks get set up on it!” 

Sophie is worried about white families wanting to move into Nicodemus, but Miss Leah points out that white people will consider a Black area to be beneath them. Of course, Sophie’s concerns are more about white speculators who will buy as much land as possible until Nicodemus becomes a predominantly white town.

“Ain’t nobody gonna give you the right to tell them when and how to sell their land. No point in ownin’ it if you can’t do what you want with it.” 

Part of the freedom that Sophie prizes on her own land is accepting that others also have the freedom to make choices that might conflict with her dreams. Miss Leah points out that not everyone will have the same priorities and that anyone who has different priorities isn’t going to vote to have their rights limited.

“We could have so much here if these colored folks would just step lively. We could own this whole prairie. Nothing but colored folks farms and colored folks wheat fields and colored folks cattle everywhere you look. Nothing but colored folks! But they can’t see it. They look at Nicodemus and all they can see is a bunch of scuffling people trying to get ready for the winter instead of something free and fine and all our own. Most of them don’t even know what we’re doing here!” 

Frontier life is hard and dangerous, requiring skills and endurance that many people of Nicodemus learned as slaves in the fields. However, Sophie recognizes that instead of having their labor stolen and breaking their bodies for people who treat them like animals, they’re toiling to build something that they get to keep. Sophie has little faith that her fellow homesteaders can resist the temptation of a large pay-out in favor of the long-term dream of an entire town that can be their own. As the end of the play reveals, however, enough people do see this dream that Sophie wins the vote.

“One time, she was laughing so hard I was afraid she was going to have a stroke. She scared me to death. When she calmed down, I asked her well, why didn’t you ever laugh like that in Memphis? And she said her laugh was too free to come out in a place where a colored woman’s life wasn’t worth two cents on the dollar. What kind of fool would find that funny, she asked me. She was right, too. Sophie’s always right.” 

Sophie’s life has made her tough and serious. In Memphis, she felt stifled, always on guard to protect herself and her sisters. However, in the first moment of the play, Sophie sets down her shotgun and puts her feet up to enjoy some licorice. Fannie is surprised to realize that Sophie can be lighthearted and joyful instead of constantly intense. The threat of Frank challenges that, but at the end of the play, Sophie is ready to dance with her sisters.

“This here my son, I say. I callin’ him Samson like in the bible ’cause he gonna be strong! Overseer laugh and say, good! Colonel Harrison always lookin’ for strong n*****s to pick his cotton. I want to tell him that not what I got in mind for my Samson, but I kept my mouth shut like I had some sense. I ain’t never been no fool.” 

At 14, Miss Leah gave birth to her first son, the result of forced mating and rape that the overseer orchestrated and observed when she was 1The manner of conception was a way to treat her like an animal. When Miss Leah had the baby, she hoped he’d live to be a strong, powerful man, but the overseer reminded her that to him, the baby was also an animal, and his strength would be stolen to benefit his oppressors. However, the end of slavery was then about 25 years away. Although Samson was stolen and sold, if he was as strong as Miss Leah wished, he may have had a chance to become free as a young man.

“Two things I’m sure of. I don’t want no white folks tellin’ me what to do all day, and no man tellin’ me what to do all night.” 

Within the social power structure of race and traditional gender roles, a Black woman in 1898 had the least power. A former slave, Sophie was owned by a white man and saw that even outside of slavery she was still subject to white dominance in Memphis. Sophie came to Kansas and labored in dangerous conditions to escape being at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. She has the freedom to run her own farm and to lead as the head of the household. Therefore, she has no interest in marriage because a man who treats her like property isn’t much better to her than a slave owner.

“We have to see everything differently because we’re Negroes, Fan.” 

writing. Fannie dismisses the notion that skin color should affect how someone sees the world. However, Sophie recognizes that being Black affects everything about the way she sees the world and the way the world treats her. Frank writes the way he does because he’s trying not to be Black. One of the benefits of living in an all-Black town, which Sophie is fighting to protect, is that Blackness becomes the majority and no longer exists only as a mark of difference through the lens of white normativity.

“I don’t need to see nothin’ else new. I done seen enough new to last me. I don’t know why anybody wants to be all up next to a bunch of strange white folks anyway.” 

Minnie suggests that Miss Leah visit her in London, where segregation doesn’t exist. However, Miss Leah has experienced hardship and instability her entire life. She has reason to mistrust white people and has no desire to mingle with or befriend them. In Kansas, Miss Leah has finally found home and family, and she doesn’t want to leave them, even for a visit.

“Frank says he doesn’t see why he only has to be with Negroes since he has as much white blood in him as colored.”

Minnie repeats many of Frank’s ideas about race, demonstrating just how frequently Frank rants and pontificates about it at home. Although it’s technically true that Frank is equal parts Black and white, blood quantum laws didn’t treat “white blood” and “Black blood” equally. Black ancestry was treated as a pollutant, and a mixed-race person wasn’t considered white if they were more than 1/8 Black. In fact, in the early 1900s, the South adopted the one-drop rule, which stated that a person was Black if they had a single drop of Black blood. In an anti-Black society, Frank’s white blood doesn’t mean much as long as he has Black blood.

“I don’t care what he was involved in. […] Whatever it was, he didn’t deserve to die like that.” 

Sophie is appalled when Frank blithely insinuates that perhaps the recent lynching in New Orleans was warranted. Frank tries to separate himself from his Blackness, which means that he’s willing to betray and destroy other African Americans in hopes that white people will accept him. However, Sophie recognizes that lynching is dehumanizing and that no human should be killed like an animal.

“Everybody knows them stories I got. Colored folks ain’t been free long enough to have forgot what it’s like to be a slave.”

Since the play takes place only about 30 years after abolition, Miss Leah is correct that slavery is still a vivid part of living memory. However, Fannie, who wants to write down Miss Leah’s stories, and Minnie—both of whom were born free—don’t bear the trauma and memory of slavery. They don’t have the same wariness or self-protective reflexes as the characters who survived it. Fannie doesn’t understand that none of Miss Leah’s stories are joyful because they’re all permeated with the constant trauma of slavery.

“None of this makes any sense without the children.” 

Perpetrators of slavery constantly and deliberately destroyed and prevented the formation of Black family units. The regeneration of African Americans and the reaffirmation of Black humanity requires growth and family. As a slave, Miss Leah gave birth to 10 children she never saw again. The five children she had after emancipation died of fever, and then her husband died. Her family couldn’t grow in the rocky soil of slavery and poverty. Miss Leah came to Kansas to prepare better soil, to cultivate a place where Black children could not only survive but thrive. She acquired daughters who she didn’t birth, a third attempt at a family. However, if none of them have children, this family will eventually wither on the vine as well.

“Everything can’t be wrote down. No matter what Fannie tell you, some things gotta be said out loud to keep the life in ’em.” 

Miss Leah doesn’t want to let Fannie write down her stories and put them in a book. Although Fannie thinks that she’s only being cantankerous, Miss Leah sees the oral tradition of storytelling as a way to keep her stories and experiences alive, including the memory of the children and family she lost. A book is stagnant, final. It can be closed and ignored. Written stories and archives become academic and impersonal. Miss Leah isn’t ready to close the history book on slavery or on teaching the younger generations the lessons they need to learn from her experience.

“It’s not paradise yet, but it can be beautiful. The century is going to change in two years. This can be a great time for colored people. We can really be free instead of spending our lives working for the same people that used to own us. How are we ever going to be free if we have to spend all of our time doing somebody else’s laundry?” 

Sophie imagines that Nicodemus can become a thriving community built by Black people for the benefit of Black people. African Americans have little chance for success or advancement within a society that was constructed on slavery. Being employed by white people is still allowing them to profit from Black labor. In Kansas, Black people can create their own society in which African Americans labor only to advance themselves and each other.

“If we start selling to speculators everything will change. We may as well move back to Memphis.” 

Sophie knows that the only way to create a town where Black lives are treated with full human value is to build a sphere free from white gaze or the framework of racial hierarchy. In a racially volatile country, African Americans are disposable when viewed through the lens of white supremacy. If whiteness infiltrates the town, white supremacy will follow.

“But I should have known better than to depend on you for luck. You’re too black to bring me any good luck. All you got to give is misery.” 

Frank loses all his money playing poker with white men who he met on the train. He claims that he was playing well and having good luck until one of the men asked about the Black woman who he was traveling with on the train. Before the mention of Minnie, Frank was maintaining the illusion through which he pretends to be white. When that illusion was shattered, he likely started losing because he became self-conscious and lost his confidence. He blames Minnie for his Blackness because she’s a stand-in for his mother, who gave him his Blackness.

“No. It’s his fault for thinking that means they owe him something and if he doesn’t get it, he has the right to put his hands on you.” 

Sophie is the voice of reason when Minnie and Fannie attempt to excuse Frank’s abuse because he’s upset that his father’s family has rejected him. Like Frank, Sophie is a former slave. She knows that Frank was delusional to believe that his white half-brothers would ever accept him as an equal member of their family, especially since that would mean sharing their inheritance. She thinks that Frank ought to understand the master-slave dynamic, even if Minnie and Fannie don’t. Also, regardless of Frank’s pain, Minnie is a human being who doesn’t deserve to suffer as an outlet for his frustration.

“Grown people don’t change except to get more like what they are.” 

Miss Leah’s statement is an iteration of a common adage that’s often difficult to accept. Frank lavished love and attention on Minnie, making her feel special to have attracted the devotion of such a charming, handsome man. After they married and Frank took Minnie to London, where she was isolated from her family, Frank didn’t change as Minnie suggests. He stopped pretending. Over the course of her long life, Miss Leah has known many people, some cruel and others kind. She knows that Frank won’t become loving and kind again because the cruelty is who he is underneath.

“Sometimes we have to be stronger than they are, Baby Sister. We have to understand and be patient.” 

Fannie’s only role model for the dynamics of marriage is her image of her parents, who died when she was only 12. Because she loved her parents, she doesn’t recognize the flaws in their relationship when she tells stories about them. She reassures Minnie that Frank is a lot like their late father, who she describes as a “good man” with a “terrible temper” (50). Fannie’s desire to remember him as a good father pushes her to excuse his anger and even the physical abuse she witnessed. Their mother was patient and waited—but this is a dangerous strategy for a victim of abuse. Therefore, by telling Minnie to be strong through patience, Fannie is romanticizing the notion of taking abuse instead of encouraging Minnie to find true strength and extract herself from the marriage.

“Every colored woman ought to have a piece of land she can claim as her own.” 

For most of her life, Miss Leah owned nothing and had nowhere to be safe. As a slave, she had no respite from the overseer and wasn’t even allowed to keep her own children. She stayed with James, the father of her first 10 children, because he was kind and familiar, but their relationship wasn’t formed out of choice. She tried to make a home but lost her five other children and husband to illness. Determined to make a new life, Miss Leah headed to Kansas alone, starting with nothing but finally creating a home on land she owned. Even though she now lives with Sophie, her land is a tangible piece of safety that belongs to her and cannot be taken away. Even though Minnie lives in London, the deed gives her equal ownership and the safety of home where she is always welcome to return.

“They don’t have to claim me. I look just like them!”

Frank is light-skinned enough to sometimes pass as white, and he has convinced himself that having a white father makes him white enough for a racist country. However, even though Frank’s lineage is a fact, which his father acknowledged and which his resemblance to his half-brothers reinforces, his father’s family denies his paternity. Frank clings to his father as a way of legitimizing his whiteness and his claim to an inheritance. He doesn’t expect that his half-brothers’ full whiteness will give them the power to bury the truth that their father was his father.

“I could stick around here and take over your precious town if I wanted to. You ever see a group of colored people who didn’t put the lightest one in charge?” 

Frank belittles Sophie (who is also half-white but recognizes herself as Black) by pointing out the precariousness of the Black utopia she’s trying to build. Through centuries of slavery and conditioning, African Americans were taught to defer to white supremacy or risk their own safety. Frank is highlighting the reason that Sophie doesn’t want even one white family to settle in Nicodemus. She knows that white supremacy would follow.

“All the dreams we have for Nicodemus, all the churches and schools and libraries we can build don’t mean a thing if a colored woman isn’t safe in her own house.” 

Sophie took Minnie and Fannie out of Memphis not only to find a place to be free to reach their potential but also because she recognized that Memphis was not safe. Before Minnie was married, she was protected in their house. After Frank brutalizes Minnie, Fannie is still reluctant to take a stand and kill Frank. Fannie is an enthusiastic participant in Sophie’s dreams for the town and believes that they can create a Black haven. However, Sophie reminds her that the breach of Minnie’s safety in the place where she should be safest threatens the very foundation of their plans. Ultimately, Fannie takes the leading role in defending her family by feeding Frank the poisoned pie.