Read Bleeding Kansas Online

Authors: Sara Paretsky

Bleeding Kansas

BOOK: Bleeding Kansas
3.79Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
BLEEDING KANSAS
ALSO BY SARA PARETSKY

Fire Sale

Blacklist

Total Recall

Hard Time

Ghost Country

Windy City Blues

Tunnel Vision

Guardian Angel

Burn Marks

Blood Shot

Bitter Medicine

Killing Orders

Deadlock

Indemnity Only

BLEEDING KANSAS
Sara Paretsky

G. P. P
UTNAM'S
S
ONS
     
New York

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Copyright © 2008 by Sara Paretsky
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Paretsky, Sara.
   Bleeding Kansas / Sara Paretsky.
     p.          cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-1192-2

1. Rural families—Kansas—Fiction. 2. Iraq War, 2003–—Influence—Fiction. 3. Iraq War, 2003–—Protest movements—Fiction. 4. Fundamentalists—Kansas—Fiction. 5. Conservatism—Kansas—Fiction. 6. Social conflict—Kansas—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.A647B56 2008 2007035962
813'.54—dc22

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

For Nicholas, Jonathan, Daniel, and Jeremy
Fellow refugees from our own patch of bleeding Kansas

The promised peace has not yet come to Kansas. With many fears, and

many sufferings before them in the cold months coming, they will look

forward to a day of deliverance, when the new reign of peace and

righteous laws takes the place of oppression and tyranny.

—Mrs. Sara Robinson,
Kansas,
1856

THANKS

I attended a two-room country school but know nothing about farming. Without the help of the Pendleton family—John and Karen, their children, Margaret, Will, and Liz, and John's parents, Al and Loretta—I could not have begun to write this book let alone finished it. Needless to say, the errors, which are doubtless legion, are all my own. Further, there is no resemblance whatsoever between any real Kansans, whether friends of my youth or the amazingly energetic Pendletons, and any of the people in this novel. All the characters here, especially Nasya, are creations of my own hectic imagination.

Thanks to Karen Pendleton, I am a proud honorary member of the Meadowlark chapter of Kansas 4-H; the many skills Lara Grellier learns in 4-H in this novel are a real sample of what Kansas kids actually do learn.

I spent an informative afternoon at the Newhouse Dairy near Topeka. I am grateful to a very overworked Will Newhouse for taking time out of a day that starts at four each morning, for the first milking, to talk to me. As he warned me, that was scarcely a beginning of understanding dairy farming, so I apologize for the numerous liberties I have taken with cows in this book.

Professor Allan Lines, at Ohio State University, provided much useful information on farm economics.

Sue Novak, at the Kansas State Historical Society, was generous with her time and resources as I began my research into Kansas pioneer history. Sheryl Williams, curator of Special Collections at the University of Kansas, was most helpful in directing me to sources on the early history of settlement in Kansas.

My brother Jonathan helped in many ways, from talking over the book as it developed, introducing me to Douglas County DA Angie Wilson, who generously provided information and advice on Kansas law and Douglas County courts, to helping create the Hebrew-speaking heifer.

I have taken a number of liberties with the Douglas County government, including times of bond hearings, and the behavior of the sheriff's department, which I modeled more on Cook County, where I live, than on the real behavior of Douglas County deputies. In addition, for my own story needs I moved the county fair from August to July, which would never happen in reality. I have also added about a mile to the landscape between Lawrence and Eudora to accommodate the Schapens, Grelliers, Fremantles, Ropeses, and Burtons so that I need not displace the Pendletons, Wickmans, and other actual farmers in the valley.

If you are ever in Douglas County, look up the Pendleton Country Market. My old two-room school, Kaw Valley District 95, where I played baseball with more zest than skill, is now a high-end prep school not too far from Highway 10. It now boasts many rooms.

With the exception of Z's Espresso Bar, every place and person mentioned in this book is fictional.

BACKGROUND

I grew up in eastern Kansas in the valley of two rivers, the Wakarusa and the Kaw. On maps, you'll see the Kansas River, but we call it the Kaw, as the Indians who first settled there did, and that is the name I use in this book.

I've been away from Kansas for forty years, but it still is in my bones. The landscapes of childhood are so familiar that it is hard to write about them. I see Chicago more clearly now than I do the prairies, where my brothers and I hiked and worked and played. It took eight years of thinking about the people and places I knew before I could write this novel.

In the 1850s, the ferocious struggle over slavery in Kansas earned the territory the nickname “Bleeding Kansas.” The wars fought on that soil were among the bloodiest in our nation's history, as pro-and anti-slavery forces battled over whether the territory would join the Union as slave or free. John Brown's name is well known, but at least a thousand anti-slavery emigrants were murdered in cold blood by “border ruffians,” as they were called, who poured into Kansas Territory from the neighboring slave state, Missouri, with the tacit consent of territorial governor Wilson Shannon, himself a slave owner. In 1861, Kansas came into the Union as a free state, but Lawrence suffered a bloody massacre in 1863 in which hundreds were murdered by raiders led by the Missouri slave supporter William Quantrill, who took advantage of most of the able-bodied men being away fighting for the Union.

I grew up on that history, on knowing I shared a heritage of resistance against injustice. Harriet Beecher Stowe's brother, Henry Ward Beecher, sent “Beecher's Bibles” into Kansas Territory: trunks full of rifles for anti-slavery forces covered with Bibles so they could get past the slavers who controlled access to Kansas. I grew up proud of the role of pioneer women, who sewed bullets into their crinolines to smuggle them past the slaver guards.

A century after Kansas came into the Union as a free state, it was painful to acknowledge that Lawrence was a segregated town. In the 1960s and '70s, in a reprise of Bleeding Kansas, the town of Lawrence and the University of Kansas became the site of some of the bloodiest campus battles in the nation—over segregation, over women's rights, the Vietnam War, American Indian rights, African-American rights. Some of the town reacted in alarm, convinced that Communists had taken over the town, the university, and the county. The Republican revolution began then. People who thought African-Americans and women were out of line demanding their rights began taking over government at the grass-roots level to ensure that old-fashioned values would prevail.

This novel is set in the present, against the backdrop of that history. It is set on the farms of the Kaw Valley, where I grew up. In 1958, my parents bought a farmhouse east of town to escape the poisonous segregation of the era, which affected African-Americans the most but, to a lesser degree, Jews as well. The house we lived in had been owned by the Gilmore family, who at one time farmed ten thousand acres in the Kaw Valley. My family lived in that house for forty years, but locals still call it the Gilmore house, never the Paretsky house, and in this novel the Fremantle house is treated in the same way. Like the Fremantle house, “our” house had a Tiffany chandelier in the dining room, a silver-backed water fountain in the upper hall, and many beautiful fireplaces.

CONTENTS
BOOK: Bleeding Kansas
3.79Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Blood Oranges by John Hawkes
The Healers Apprentice by Melanie Dickerson
Tracers by Adrian Magson
Birds of a Feather by Don Easton
Fallout by Ariel Tachna
None but the Dead by Lin Anderson