I  know  there were some folks at Fort Dodge who thought it was mighty peculiar that  a white woman and her boy would be accompanied on the lonesome trail east  by      a big black man. A few of the ladies tried  to  talk  my  mother  out  of  going,  telling  her  that  to  do  so would most certainly lead to some horrible kind of violation of her person.

The captain would hear none of it. “Luther is a good man—why, I would trust him with my own wife and child,” he told my mother. “You needn’t worry about what any of those clucking hens say.”

Years later, my mother told me the trip to Lawrence from Fort Dodge—a distance of almost three hundred miles—took about...

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