It Was, In Fact, Our First Rodeo

Right under my nose, this whole time.

I never felt that my hometown liked me that much. I loved the place - the woods behind my backyard running all the way to the river, the state park with its little waterfall you can ride down, the beautiful Beaux-Arts courthouse sitting on the highest spot in the county (that’s not saying much, but on a clear day you can see its dome from almost anywhere), the bar and grill where you can slide your canoe onto the riverbank and walk up for a Coke and a Tombstone pizza the way only a bar pizza oven can make it. My closest friends, among whom are some of the most interesting and cool people I have ever met, came to me in that place. But I always felt out of place in my hometown, and by the time I graduated from high school, I couldn’t wait to leave.

Kankakee County was, in the 1970s, an insular place. It wasn’t just that our place on a main railroad coming from Chicago to anywhere failed to sustain a manufacturing economy, although the town did start dying when most of the corporate headquarters and plants left for cheaper southern or offshore ground and labor. It was also partly because outside the three glued-together municipalities of Kankakee, Bradley, and Bourbonnais, most of the county is farmland, and when you depend on farmland, your opportunities to get out into the rest of the world are limited by all the shit you have to do all the time. And outside of a couple of spots, the entire county is overwhelmingly homogeneous. It is possible to live there your entire life without ever coming to Chicago, and why would you? Chicago is SCARY. It’s definitely not, but there is an awful lot of unknown, if you’re not used to difference. In the farming communities outside the center of the county, there’s also not much reason to even go into town unless that’s where your church is or you need to pick up some water softener at Farm and Fleet. I didn’t understand that while I was trying to navigate childhood there; I only understood that everyone seemed the same and I was different in some way that most of my peers found intolerable.

Like most nascent weirdos, I spent my childhood there in sort of a tightrope act, staying interested in the things I was interested in, mostly books and the piano, but trying to keep it to myself enough to avoid ridicule. I was not super successful at that second part, and a lot of what I wound up doing was exploring. Before I could drive, it was in the woods and on the creek leading to the river, or around the fishing lake, on construction sites in our growing subdivision. And after I got my license, it was on the roads outside town, the places nobody bothers to visit. To the little island on the river in Momence where people lived and it looked like Tom Sawyer in miniature. To Lehigh to see the giant limestone mountain next to the quarry that was invisible from the road. Down Route 52, blasting Permanent Waves with the windows open, to drive through the night summer air to Watseka where a music professor would drive up from Champaign to give me jazz piano lessons in some church once every couple weeks. I probably should have been listening to more Monk then, but that’s a whole other show.

One place in Kankakee County that is unfamiliar even to almost everybody living there is Pembroke Township. The county, like most of Illinois’ 102 counties, is overwhelmingly and dominantly white, traditionally Catholic, having been “settled” by French Canadians, traders like Noel LeVasseur and Antoine and Francois Bourbonnais, who I’m pretty sure didn’t pronounce their last names “Bur-BONE-us” as all the townspeople did until 1975 when, and I am not kidding, the village leadership suddenly decided to fancy up and change it to “Bur-bun-NAY.” Although the farms surrounding the towns show a history of homesteading and farming Swedes like my grandpa, Germans like my grandma, Dutch, and Irish, to live in the county as a non-Catholic of non-French-Canadian origins was to be something of an outlier to begin with. My name wasn’t Arseneau or Bissonnette or Tetrault or Soucie, and I didn’t go to mass or CCD. My alma mater, Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School, had as many students of color in its then population of 1200 as I could count on two hands. But Pembroke Township is something entirely different, so seldom visited or even driven through by the vast majority of the county’s inhabitants that the only common knowledge about the place is “black farmers,” or to my less well-behaved classmates, “ditch weed.”

The township, before it was a township, was just empty. Unlike most of the county, it hadn’t been bought up for its rich black soil over generous limestone and tilled and infused with crop after crop, corn or beans or sod or flowers or strawberries. The dirt was sandy, part of what’s almost preposterously known as the Illinois Dunes. There aren’t any dunes, and unless you dig or come across a bald spot, you don’t really see any sand. It’s flat, like everywhere else. So back in the 1860s, Pembroke was settled and homesteaded by Joseph and Mary Eliza Tetter. They’d released themselves from a North Carolina slave owner, and when they found the sandy dirt, they farmed it, welcomed other people who had released themselves from slavery on their own recognizance, and formed the Black agricultural community that goes on today.

Now, I didn’t even drive through Pembroke Township in my teenage explorations of the county; I just went there with my dad once. He was the village attorney for Hopkins Park, population 800 now but back in 1980 it was somewhere between 250 and 700, depending on how you define the village’s borders and who you think might not willingly respond to a 1980 census count. And he took me there to open my eyes to how big a fight a community not even 20 miles away from me had to get the basic infrastructure they were entitled to as part of the county. There is no municipal water source. There’s certainly not a downtown, unless you count The 4-Way, named after the one intersection in the township with four-way stop signs. I did go back to Pembroke Township a few times while I worked in the Kankakee County State’s Attorney’s office, in the civil division, on site visits with the county building inspector. Then during the midterm elections in 1994, all the assistant state’s attorneys were sent to various polling locations where there might be some Democrats hiding, so we could, you know, monitor for shenanigans. I was sent to Hopkins Park, presumably because I was the only lawyer who knew where it was. There weren’t any shenanigans, but there were donuts someone drove into Momence to get in case the election judges, or voters, or poll watchers, needed one.

As the above is the extent of my experience with Pembroke Township, I didn’t learn until last year that the Pembroke Rodeo was a thing that has taken place every Memorial Day weekend for almost as long as I have been alive. This was amazing news to me, and I immediately decided to go at the next opportunity. I was excited about taking the kids - although I make it a habit to frequently drag them to places and events where large numbers of people who are Black like them will congregate, most of those places are either close by in Oak Park or the south side of Chicago, or they’re in cities we’ve visited like New Orleans and Memphis. I wanted to show them that wondrous things also happen in the middle of nowhere, and the Pembroke Rodeo, hosted by Latting Rodeo Productions at Thyrll Latting Memorial Arena, is a Black rodeo, in the middle of nowhere.

Festive events in rural places are always a banger, and there is nothing quite like the thrill of getting there. You drive through miles of fields, nobody in sight but an occasional guy on a tractor who will wave a little hello at you, until at long last your directional instincts are confirmed by little puffs of dust from the cars on the gravel road way ahead of you, then you’re suddenly in a line of cars, trucks, and RVs parked on the side of the road, and a giant party has started. Someone has let you into a secret little world, where they took the time to organize the event, clearing the field and setting up bleachers, getting food vendors to show up, bringing a generator and stringing lights all over, getting a line of porta-potties, just so you can show up, leave the the rest of the world behind, and have a good time.

And that’s exactly what we did. We crammed onto the bleachers, itself a community effort because the bleachers were long 2x8s placed on top of a metal frame, and with no railings, climbing up meant taking the hands we were offered to steady ourselves, and once seated, offering our hands to everyone climbing up after us. Everybody cheered for everybody as the cowboys flew past, trying to grab steer horns and flags and kicking up dust while their horses rounded barrels. During the children’s barrel race, the smaller contestants were strapped into their saddles, bouncing around cutely while their unoccupied stirrups flapped. Their cowboy fathers led the horses through the course while we all hollered our encouragement and the announcer wisecracked about how fast the dads could run in their boots. Only the winner knows who won any of these events, because at the rodeo, it’s clear that getting out there on your horse, with or without your dad, makes you a winner.

It was a sunny and gorgeous day, which isn’t to be taken for granted on an Illinois Memorial Day where you don’t know very far in advance whether it’s going to be 50 degrees with bone-chilling rain or an unbearable 90 degrees. But to me, the most beautiful thing about the rodeo was the intermission. My daughter, usually anxious and a little clingy in unfamiliar crowds, snatched the cash out of my hand and skipped off through a sea of people to the food trucks for treats. The emcee announced that it was time for Boots On the Ground, inviting everyone into the arena for a little line dancing, and my son, who is quickly overwhelmed by crowds and loud noises, ran onto the field, not to dance but to make friends with any boy out there who looked about his age. They had said at the beginning that the Pembroke Rodeo was a homecoming, and my kids were at home in the middle of a thousand strangers who looked like them.

And the rodeo wasn’t in the middle of nowhere, not really; it wasn’t even hard to find. Until pretty recently, though, Pembroke Township was very much ignored. Like other rural areas, the township’s residents rely on well water for everything from drinking to growing crops and fire prevention. That has always posed its own problems, which in the 1990s were evident from the series of burned-out trailers dotting the lush green landscape. Then at some point, other people started to notice the lush green landscape, and a lot of the surrounding area was bought up by larger farming conglomerates, mostly next door in Indiana, with the resources to install irrigation systems that extracted water from the shared shallow water table, away from the Pembroke wells. That meant the family who already had a tiny crop under permanent threat of one dry summer also had to contend with an even more limited water supply with even more risk of contamination. And one bad season for that family kills their whole operation, their water for the crop and livestock and bathing and drinking, and sooner not later, their home.

Which brings me to the other big change that showed up uninvited to Pembroke Township. On the way home from the rodeo, I took “the scenic route” into Kankakee, so I could show Marty and the kids more of the river and my dad’s old Sears Kit house and the best hot dog stand in the world, which is Jaenicke’s, also by the river. I noticed some nature preserve signs along the Pembroke roads that were definitely not there 30 years ago but were now tucked in between the little farms and ranches. I tried to notice the lush green landscape, but the signs got to me a little. Who decided that this particular nature, after a hundred-plus years of preserving itself, suddenly needed saving, and from what?

The Nature Conservancy, that’s who! Now, there have to be loads of county, state, and federal parks whose preservation initially involved some kind of land grant that in turn involved buying or kicking out whoever happened to already be living there. In fact, there is a whole musical, written by Wisconsin’s national treasure Katie Dahl, about Peninsula State Park in Door County and the eminent domain that brought the park into existence in 1909. In “The Fisherman’s Daughter,” which we saw last summer at Northern Sky Theater in that very park, I learned that eminent domain played a crucial role in my getting to spend every summer of my life hiking those trails and touring the lighthouse and climbing Eagle Tower to look down on the white spires of Ephraim’s two Moravian churches. " The musical contains the happy ending of Wisconsin’s governor granting the fisherman’s daughters the right to stay on their property for life, only after their deaths to seize the land to make a campground or a theater or whatever. Obviously, it wasn’t the first land grab in Door County, but the only remnant I have of the first one in my own living memory is that when I was little, Chief Roy Oshkosh of the Menominee Nation still lived in Door County and held powwows that were open to the public at his trading post on the south end of Egg Harbor. We went to one. I was about five. I got to meet Chief Oshkosh, who obligingly sold my parents a tom-tom for me when I found out I could not have the moccasins I wanted. The Chief is long gone, but the trading post is still there, and if you kayak on the Green Bay side up by Ellison Bay, you can see some cliff paintings reminding you that you are vacationing on Menominee and Oneida lands.

Anyway, Pembroke Township doesn’t have a musical; it barely has a trading post, unless you count the gas station at the 4-Way. But it has a nature preserve now, called “Kankakee Sands.” The little weirdo inside me who loved staring at plants and trees, tadpoles and birds, rocks and moss by the river still loves all of that, and I routinely drag my children and sometimes Marty, a Latvian tree-worshiper himself, into the woods to traipse and look around. While I drove, trying to take in the lush green landscape as much as I could, the nature preserve signs in Pembroke Township kept hitting me with the same question: Who stopped ignoring this place all of a sudden? So when we got home with bellies full of delicious red hots with sauce and cheese, don’t bother ordering anything else because you’d just be missing nirvana, I decided to get to the bottom of it.

Part of it, maybe most of it, is nice. Someone in Iroquois County just south of Pembroke Township decided to donate some land to The Nature Conservancy, and The Nature Conservancy started to pay attention to what was going on in the area. And there’s a lot going on there; because of its marshy history and sandy present, there are quite a few species of plants and animals that don’t really exist anywhere else. There are even bison there now, reintroduced to the area about 10 years ago.

You can get an idea of the not-so-nice part of it from this map:

Large swaths of preserve, open for your frolicking and enjoyment. Thank you, The Nature Conservancy! But when you look at some of those tiny green rectangles of land “protected by The Nature Conservancy and its partners,” you are also looking at the price somebody had to pay for your frolicking and enjoyment. You are looking at a piece of property that someone farmed or kept livestock or just tried to live on for generations until a dry summer and a dry well, or a bad crop, or just bad circumstances, killed their operation. And the inevitability of property taxes inevitably led to a tax sale that those residents could not afford to attend in order to continue living there. But The Nature Conservancy could, and did, purchasing those little rectangles to re-wild and integrate into the Kankakee Sands.

It’s probably more important now than ever to think about public-use lands like national parks and nature preserves as a public good, maybe even to try to stop tree-filled oxygen-producing public lands from being turned into desert to generate AI slop or oil production or whatever. And The Nature Conservancy is taking care of these lands with genuine enthusiasm for all of the different species of flora and fauna that only survive in their unique ecosystem. They also, in describing the geological and human history of Kankakee Sands, acknowledge what all of Illinois knows, that we are sitting and having coffee and building condos and taking weekend hikes on Potawatomi land. They mention Pap Tetter and the bison and a “burgeoning” Black agricultural community, although it may burgeon more had some assistance been available to the people whose property they bought at tax sale. Of course, they do not mention the displaced residents or the tax sales on their website.

I didn’t find out where those people were going to go after losing their homes, or whether The Nature Conservancy’s land acquisition budget contains a line item for facilitating their relocation. Maybe The Nature Conservancy provides land stewardship employment and housing assistance to the previous stewards of the land. That might serve as something of a happy ending, even if nobody writes a musical about it.