From North Carolina to Indian Territory

The train traveling west from Greenville, North Carolina, left the station three hours late. But Meta Chestnutt didn't mind. The only thing that mattered to her was that she was going to Indian Territory and the challenges awaiting her there. The conductor eventually made his way to her row.

"What city, Miss?"

"Silver City, Indian Territory."

"I beg your pardon."

"Silver City," she repeated.

"You must be mistaken. There is no such place."

"Oh, but there is and I am going there."

"I will have to let you off at the next stop and you can talk with the station agent."

After looking at his map, the agent repeated what the conductor had said: there was no Silver City, Indian Territory. The best the agent could do was to send Meta some forty miles further west, to Goldsboro, North Carolina. Perhaps the people in the station office there could help her.

The agent at Goldsboro gave her no more help. He suggested that she take the next train to Richmond, Virginia. By that point, Meta was exasperated. She had letters with her, sent by Annie Erwin and postmarked "Silver City, I.T."  She insisted that there was such a place, and that she had to get there. But her only choice was to go to Richmond. Maybe someone there could help her.[1]

Thanks to the nineteenth-century's transportation revolution, by 1889 the United States had been knit together by an ever-expanding network of railroads. From 1850 to 1870, massive investment in railroad construction created a web of tracks totaling 53,000 miles. The first transcontinental railroad was completed in May 1869. By the end of the 1880s, the decade when construction reached a fever pitch, there were 164,000 miles miles of track in operation.[2]

Still, for all of that, no railroad ever reached Silver City, Indian Territory. Meta Chestnutt knew the place was there. But judging from a map of the nation's railroads, it wasn't. She must have felt anxious as she rode the train 165 miles from Goldsboro, North Carolina, to Richmond, Virginia, following the path of today's Interstate-95. If she was ever going to make it to Silver City, she would need to travel south and west. At this point, she was going north and east!

At Richmond, the agent encountered the same problem, but had the presence of mind to ask, "Do you know of any town that might be near where you want to go?" Looking at the map, the only place Meta could suggest was Oklahoma City. So the agent sold her a ticket to Oklahoma City and suggested that she send word to her friends in Indian Territory to pick her up there. She was starting her trip to the west all over again. This time, she was further away.

It would be difficult to trace the exact route that Chestnutt followed from Virginia to Indian Territory. It appears, however, that she eventually traveled west through Missouri and into Kansas before heading south into I.T.

At some point in Kansas, she had a brief encounter she would remember for the rest of her life. A black man boarded the crowded train and looked for an empty seat. He noticed the spot next to Meta and sat down. Immediately, the white woman from North Carolina, born during the Civil War, the grand-daughter of slave owners, reacted. Not once in her life had she been that close to a black man. In fact, the only time she could remember seeing an African-American beside a white person, it was a servant girl sitting next to her white mistress.

Meta concealed her anxiety and disgust as best she could, but her emotions must have shown. Soon, a white man spoke up and asked the black man sitting next to Miss Chestnutt to move and sit next to him instead. With no apparent surprise or indignation, the black man stood up, walked to the seat next to the white man, and sat down.

Telling this story years later, Meta insisted that the black man who sat next to her that day was someone whose photo sometimes appeared in the newspapers: George Washington Carver. When recalling the episode, she would add, "I would be proud to have him sit beside me today."[3]

The available facts support Meta's story. For example, the train that brought her to Oklahoma City in 1889 ran on the Southern Kansas Railway, a subsidiary of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, traveling south out of Kansas.[4] As a young man, George Washington Carver left his home in Diamond, Missouri, and moved to Kansas. For several years until 1890, Carver spent much of his time in Kansas, Missouri, and Iowa "seeking an education while supporting himself doing laundry, cooking, and homesteading."[5]

Notes

[1] Eva Heiliger, "Born to Meet Adversity (and Rise Above It)," 31-32. The unpublished book typescript is located in box 1, folders 6 and 7, Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection, Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City. The spoken words here do not come from a transcript. Instead, they represent what appears to be Heiliger's imaginative recreation of what could have been said--and might likely have been said--at a certain point in Meta Chestnutt's story. Heiliger was Sager's great niece as well as biographer. As the Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection reveals, the two women corresponded with one another for many years.

In one of his books that contains reported dialogue, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote, "The reader is entitled to ask if the material here is factually reliable. Reliable is the perfect word in this context. The book is not strictly factual, in that conversations are reported which cannot be documented as having taken place word for word. Yet it is reliable in that these words might well have been spoken. There are zero distortions here--no thought is engrafted in anyone that alters the subject's character or inclinations, or even habits of speech." William F. Buckley Jr., Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater (Philadelphia: Basic Books, 2008), xi-xii. In the spirit of Buckley's apology I occasionally report dialogue taken from Eva Heiliger's manuscript.

[2] Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 532.

[3] Heiliger, Born to Meet Adversity, 32-34. Chestnutt's emotional reaction in this instance might be compared to a story Melton A. McLaurin tells in his memoir, Separate Pasts: Growing Up White in the Segregated South, 2nd ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 27-41. McLaurin's chapter titled "Bobo" is named for a black childhood acquaintance of the McLaurin's. The two boys had gone to a store where they used an air compressor to inflate a leaky basketball. Bobo put the air needle in his mouth first. The first attempt at airing up the basketball didn't work. So McLaurin, without thinking, put the needle in his own mouth. Instantly, he recognized what he had done. For a moment, he imagined that Bobo's blackness was somehow already infecting him. Still, he managed to conceal his distress. Part of his assumed white superiority meant that he could not visibly react. Later, though, he went by himself to an outdoor spigot where he repeatedly rinsed out his mouth.

[4] See Augustus J. Veenendaal, Jr., "Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway," The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=AT001, and Linda D. Wilson, "Oklahoma City," The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=OK025.

[5] Linda O. McMurry, "Carver, George Washington," in American National Biography, ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4:513.