Chapter 1Fort Scott

Foreword

There is a woman in this book I might, under other circumstances, have written a book about. Her name is Ella Watson. She cleaned government offices in Washington after dark, pushing a mop through corridors hung with photographs of a poverty she was living and was never asked to consider. She raised children on a wage that kept her inside the same hardship the building was meant to document. She is exactly the kind of subject I have spent my working life defending: a woman whose labor held up the institutions that declined to look at her, a life the museum would have filed, if it filed her at all, under someone else's name.

But Ella Watson is not the artist of this book. The artist is the man who photographed her, and that reversal is the reason I crossed the country and the medium and the sex of my usual subjects to write it.

My beat has been the corridor outside the main gallery. I write about painters and performers and photographers who were kept waiting — and my argument, book after book, has always been the same plea: look at her, you were wrong not to. I have made a discipline of insisting that the overlooked be admitted. What I had not written about, until Gordon Parks, was someone who declined to wait in the corridor at all. He was kept out of the same rooms my women were kept out of — too poor, too Black, too self-taught, too far from anywhere that mattered. But he did not stand at the door and argue for entry. He bought a camera in a pawnshop for seven dollars and fifty cents and made the act of looking his weapon. That is the distinction that pulled me in: the difference between being overlooked and making looking itself the fight.

Consider what he did with Ella Watson. He stood her in front of the American flag, a mop in one hand and a broom behind her, and he made an image that answered Grant Wood's American Gothic with a charwoman's arithmetic of survival. It was the gatekeepers' own iconography turned back on them — the pitchfork exchanged for a mop, the pious white farm couple exchanged for the woman who cleaned the floor they walked on. He did not petition the museum to see her. He composed a photograph the museum could not un-see, and then he made America look at it. A critic who has spent decades asking to be admitted recognizes, when she meets it, a man who simply forced the lock.

I came to him expecting a photographer and found something my categories were not built to hold. I expected the arc of a single medium mastered against the odds; I found a man who refused the odds and the medium both — who wrote novels and memoirs, directed films, composed music, and treated the boundary between art and advocacy as a fiction invented by people with nothing at stake. I worked from what the record allows: his three memoirs, the published photographs, the press of the decades he lived through, the archives of a public life lived very much in public. I invented nothing. He required no embellishment; the difficulty was the opposite, the difficulty of a life that keeps exceeding the frame you build for it.

What makes him worth a book is not the volume of the work, though the volume is staggering. It is the coherence underneath it — the conviction, carried unbroken from a segregated Kansas town to the walls of the world's museums, that seeing clearly is the first act of justice, that beauty is an argument, and that showing the world what it prefers not to see is the most important thing an artist can do. My women were undervalued because no one looked. Parks understood, earlier and more fiercely than anyone I have studied, that the looking was the whole battle, and he spent ninety-three years refusing to lose it.

— Sofía Estrada, Madrid

Chapter 1 · Fort Scott

The town sat on the edge of the prairie like a sentence that trailed off before reaching its verb. Fort Scott, Kansas, in the second decade of the twentieth century, was a place of nine thousand people, a dozen churches, a handful of saloons, and an understanding about where Black families belonged that was so deeply held it rarely required articulation. The understanding was spatial. Black families lived on the east side. White families lived on the west. The line was not drawn on any map, but everyone in Fort Scott knew where it was, the way everyone in a family knows which subjects are not to be raised at dinner.

Into this arrangement, on November 30, 1912, Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks was born, the fifteenth and final child of Sarah Ross Parks and Andrew Jackson Parks. The name itself was an inheritance and a declaration. Gordon for a family friend. Roger, Alexander, Buchanan for reasons lost to the family's oral record but suggestive of the aspiration that loads a child's name with more syllables than he can carry until he grows into them. The boy would eventually shed the middle names the way a river sheds tributaries as it narrows toward the sea. He would become, simply, Gordon Parks. But the full name, with its baroque amplitude, tells us something about the family he was born into: they were people who believed in the weight of naming, who saw a child's name as a promissory note drawn on the future.

Andrew Jackson Parks was a farmer. The phrase requires unpacking. A Black farmer in southeastern Kansas in 1912 occupied a position somewhere between the romantic independence of the yeoman ideal and the grinding subjugation of the Deep South's sharecropping system. Andrew Parks owned his land. Not much of it, and not the best of it, but his own. He grew vegetables and raised a few animals. By the measures available to a Black man in that place and time, he was moderately successful, which meant that his children had enough to eat, that the house did not leak in ways that could not be managed, and that the family attended the African Methodist Episcopal Church on Sunday mornings in clothes that were clean if not always new.

Sarah Ross Parks was the gravitational center of the household. Small, strong, deeply religious, she carried a conviction about education and self-improvement that she transmitted to her children with the force of a physical law. In Parks's memoirs, his mother appears as a figure of almost mythological significance: the source of warmth, the voice of encouragement, the woman who told her youngest son, when every piece of evidence pointed in the opposite direction, that he could become whatever he wished to become.

"She told me I could be anything," Parks wrote in A Choice of Weapons, the first of his memoirs, published in 1966. The sentence is simple. Its implications are not. For a Black woman in Kansas in the 1910s and 1920s to tell her child that he could be anything was an act of radical imagination. The segregated schools, the limited employment, the understanding about which side of town her family occupied: all pointed toward a circumscribed future for her children. That she refused to accept this evidence, and insisted on transmitting her refusal to her youngest son, was the first and most important gift Gordon Parks ever received.

Decades later, in The Learning Tree, Parks would reconstruct his mother's voice through the character of Sarah Winger, giving her fictional counterpart the words he had carried since childhood. The novel's title passage is Sarah Winger speaking to her son Newt on a walk home: "I hope you won't have to stay here all your life, Newt. It ain't a all-good place and it ain't a all-bad place. But you can learn just as much here about people and things as you can learn any place else. Cherokee Flats is sorta like a fruit tree. Some of the people are good and some of them are bad — just like the fruit on a tree. ... No matter if you go or stay, think of Cherokee Flats like that till the day you die — let it be your learnin' tree." This was Parks's fictionalized reconstruction of how his mother spoke, not a transcript but a distillation. He put her philosophy at the entrance to his first novel because her values had stood at the entrance to his life.

What Parks gave his fictional mother was a theology of self-reliance that broke with the orthodoxy of the Black church. "If you got a battle to fight, you cain't rightfully ask the Lord to help you and not the other fella," Sarah Winger tells Newt. "No, son, you got to fight and hope God likes the way you're using your fists." And when the boy presses her about heaven and hell, she answers with a honesty that must have been extraordinary in a Kansas churchgoing household: "Maybe there ain't no hell either. Maybe there ain't no gold thrones in the clouds and maybe there ain't no pits of fire tended by a devil with a pitchfork tail. ... All my life I've been told there is a better place beyond this one, Newt. And I guess I'll go to my grave believin' it. Such believin' has kept our family goin' when there wasn't much else to go on." Parks was writing fiction, but he was preserving something real: a woman of unusual intellectual courage who refused to give her son comfortable answers when honest ones were available.

The house on the east side of Fort Scott was crowded. Fifteen children in various stages of presence and departure, the older ones leaving as the younger ones arrived, created a demographic tide that meant Gordon, as the baby, grew up in a household simultaneously full and emptying. His older siblings appeared and disappeared, with jobs and marriages and lives of their own that the youngest child could only glimpse. In practical terms, Gordon Parks grew up as something close to an only child within a very large family, attended to by his mother, somewhat remote from his father, surrounded by siblings who were more like visiting relatives than daily companions.

Fort Scott's public schools were segregated through the eighth grade. The elementary school for Black children was inadequate by every measure: insufficient books, secondhand materials, teachers who were dedicated but underpaid and under-resourced. The white elementary school, visible from certain vantage points, was better in all the ways that buildings are better when the people inside them are considered worth investing in.

But here is what matters about Parks's childhood education. He learned to read. He learned to read well, with the fluency and hunger that would later allow him to teach himself photography from library books, to write novels and poetry, to absorb the history and technique of every art form he encountered. The segregated school in Fort Scott, whatever its failures, produced a reader. And a reader, as Parks would prove across the next eight decades, can teach himself almost anything.

The racial landscape of Fort Scott was something more insidious than the overt terrorism of the Deep South: a system of daily humiliation so woven into the texture of ordinary life that a child could almost mistake it for the natural order. Parks would remember specific incidents with the clarity that comes from having spent decades turning them over in his mind. A teacher telling Black students they need not bother with higher education because their futures were predetermined. White children who were friends during informal play becoming strangers when the social structure reasserted itself. A swimming pool that admitted Black children only on certain days, then drained and cleaned the water before white children returned.

Fort Scott's geography encoded its racial order more legibly than most towns cared to admit. The city's two wards separated Black from white in their electoral districts as efficiently as in their residential blocks. The Marmaton River, running south of town, marked a natural edge beyond which the Black community's farms gave way to white-owned land with considerably richer soil. The railroad tracks that crisscrossed the east side — the Missouri-Kansas-Texas line and the Kansas City, Fort Scott and Memphis line — bisected the Black neighborhood, providing the rumble of commerce passing through without stopping for its residents' benefit. The east side's streets were unpaved when many on the west side had been asphalted. The fire hydrants were fewer, the street lamps more widely spaced. These were not coincidences but policies.

The African American community of Fort Scott numbered approximately 800 people in the 1920 census, a figure that placed it among the larger Black communities in southeastern Kansas. This community maintained its own institutional infrastructure because the alternative was nothing: the Colored Branch of the local public library (a single room with donated books), the African Methodist Episcopal Church where Sarah Parks taught Sunday school, the Attucks School that served Black children from first through eighth grade. Attucks was named for Crispus Attucks, the Black patriot killed in the Boston Massacre of 1770, a piece of naming that held its own defiance — teaching Black children their history within a system designed to make them forget it.

The school's physical condition told the community's story clearly. When Gordon attended in the early 1920s, Attucks operated in an aging, poorly maintained building, and it received the white schools' castoff materials — worn textbooks handed down after the better-funded schools had finished with them. Parks would have read from arithmetic books with pages missing, spelling primers with exercises someone else had already completed in pencil.

Beyond these daily indignities existed the shadow of violence, understood rather than spoken about. Eastern Kansas, for all the state's free-soil mythology, had its own history of racial terror — Fort Scott itself had seen mob killings of Black men in the violent years after the Civil War, and lynchings and threats of lynching persisted across the region into the twentieth century. This history lived in the memory of every adult Black person in Fort Scott, passed down in the way that traumatic community knowledge is passed down: not always in direct words but in the careful way parents watched the street, in the particular instructions about which roads not to walk after dark, in the silence that fell in Black households when certain names were mentioned.

When such killings occurred, the law's protection routinely failed: prosecutions were rare, convictions rarer still. The lesson absorbed by the Black community was precisely the one the violence intended to teach: that the law's protection was conditional and revocable, and that the conditions were set by the white majority. Andrew Parks navigated this knowledge as a farmer who owned land in a county where Black land ownership could attract the attention of men who believed ownership was a form of insolence.

These incidents accumulated. They did not build toward a single dramatic confrontation. Instead, they formed a sediment, a layer of understanding about his place in the world that the boy absorbed before he had the language to name it. Parks's later art would be, in part, an extended response to this sediment: an insistence on seeing and being seen that began in a town where the protocol was to look away.

Andrew Jackson Parks was a quieter presence in his son's recollections than Sarah. A man of the land, practical, weathered, less inclined than his wife to speak of possibilities. Andrew was already aging by the time Gordon arrived, the fifteenth child having stretched the family's resources and perhaps the father's emotional reserves. Parks would later describe his father with respect but without the transformative warmth he reserved for his mother. Andrew Parks was the ground. Sarah Parks was the sky. The boy looked up.

The landscape of southeastern Kansas imprinted itself on Parks's visual imagination in ways that would surface decades later in his photography and films. The flatness of the prairie, the enormous skies, the way light moved across open land without obstruction: these became the baseline against which all other landscapes would be measured.

In The Learning Tree, Parks would open his novel not with character or dialogue but with weather. A tornado descends on Cherokee Flats, and twelve-year-old Newt watches from a cornfield as the sky changes: "A great swirling black cloud was moving toward him from the southwest. It was broad at the top, gradually narrowing to a point at the bottom near the earth — looking every bit like a spinning top." The storm kills a man, electrocutes cattle in sputtering blue flashes, and scatters the town. But what Parks chose to notice in the aftermath tells us what kind of artist he would become: the stone courthouse stands "unscathed," the white churches and schools are "all intact," while the Black church has lost its windows and the "colored grade school was askew on its concrete base." Even the weather, in Parks's fictionalized Kansas, reveals the architecture of inequality. The tornado does not discriminate, but the buildings it destroys were never built to the same standard.

The novel is saturated with the sensory Kansas that Parks carried with him for the rest of his life. Sunsets where "a big ball of red" sinks past the prairie line, "leaving only a glow that shot up through feathery white specks from the dark horizon." Suppers of fried chicken, yams, browned clabber gravy, and cornbread, washed down with buttermilk. The sound of the church clock "wanging" the hour. Frogs leaping into the open after rain while "crickets made chirping noises with their wings, rubbing away the wetness." The swimming hole where sunlight reflects "on its flat, slow-moving surface, snaking in and out of the craggy rocks and tall trees." These details are a photographer's details — light, texture, the arrangement of objects in space — recorded decades before Parks held a camera but already composing the world into images.

When Parks, in his seventies, returned to Kansas to photograph the places of his childhood, the images carried the quality of a man seeing a landscape he had never stopped seeing, for whom the flat horizon line of the Kansas prairie was the first horizon line, the one against which all others were composed.

Fort Scott in those years was a railroad town, a farming town, a town that sat at the junction of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railway and the Kansas City, Fort Scott and Memphis Railroad, which meant that the wider world passed through regularly but rarely stopped for long. The town had been founded in 1842 as a military outpost, named for General Winfield Scott, and it carried the memory of its martial origins in its street grid and its posture. Fort Scott was orderly. Fort Scott was organized. Fort Scott knew where things went.

The Kansas that the young Gordon Parks inhabited was not the flat abstraction of national imagination but a place of specific weathers and specific commerce. Bourbon County in 1912 was shifting from its cattle-trail past toward coal mining, and the mines brought immigrant labor — Czech and Slovak families settling in communities like Walnut and Uniontown — alongside the older German and American farm families. The multiethnic working class of Bourbon County shared the experience of economic precariousness with the Black community but did not share its particular legal vulnerability. A Czech miner who fell behind on rent was evicted. A Black farmer who fell behind on rent could face worse, and Andrew Parks was aware of the distinction.

The county's coal economy gave Fort Scott its modest prosperity in the first decades of the century. The railroads, carrying coal east and finished goods west, required labor at every junction, and Black men worked as section hands maintaining track, as laborers loading and unloading freight, as workers in the rail yards that gave the town its economic rhythm. It was reliable work at the bottom of the wage scale, and it contributed to the Black community's economic survival without improving its relative position.

The Black community was small, perhaps a thousand people, and it was self-contained in the way that segregation forced all Black communities to be self-contained. It had its own churches, its own social organizations, its own internal hierarchies of respectability and achievement. The African Methodist Episcopal Church, where the Parks family worshipped, was the center of this community, and Sarah Parks was deeply embedded in its life. The church provided what the public institutions withheld: a space where Black children were told they had value, where Black adults could exercise leadership, where the community could see itself reflected in terms that were not defined by white supremacy.

Fort Scott's AME congregation had been established in the 1870s, when Kansas was still drawing freedpeople who had migrated north and west after emancipation in search of land and a life out of the reach of former slave states' terror. The congregation's founding generation had come from Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas — places where emancipation had been followed by violence and resubjugation under the Black Codes. Kansas had seemed different. Fort Scott's AME church was built on that hope. By the time Gordon Parks was born in 1912, the church stood on East Oak Street as both sanctuary and social center: the place where the community held its debates, organized its relief for families in hardship, educated its children on Sunday afternoons in ways the public school did not.

Gordon Parks's childhood, reconstructed from his memoirs and from the few surviving accounts of family members, was the childhood of a Black boy in a Kansas town in the 1910s and 1920s: constrained by race, supported by family, shaped by the textures of a particular place. He played. He went to school. He did chores. He listened to his mother. He watched the trains come and go. By his own account, he was a dreamy child, given to looking at things longer than other children looked at them, as though trying to understand how they were arranged.

This prolonged gaze was already the photographer's eye beginning to form. Photography, at its most fundamental, is the discipline of sustained looking, the art of seeing what is actually there rather than what convention says should be there. The boy in Fort Scott, watching the town's racial arrangements with the unblinking attention of a child who has not yet learned to look away, was already practicing.

The family's economic life was precarious, subject to weather, to market fluctuations, to the baseline disadvantage of being Black in a system designed to concentrate wealth in white hands. Andrew Parks managed. He kept the family fed and housed. But there was no surplus, no cushion against disaster, and the children understood from an early age that their labor was not optional.

What Gordon did not learn, because there was no one to teach him and no resources to learn from, was anything about the arts that would later define his life. No cameras in the Parks household. No paintings on the walls that were not religious prints. There was music (the hymns of the AME church, the popular songs that filtered through the community) but no formal musical instruction. The artistic education of Gordon Parks would come later, and it would come entirely from his own initiative.

But there was one figure in the boy's world who spoke about seeing in a way that mattered. In The Learning Tree, Parks gave his Uncle Rob — a blind man who had lost his eyes in an explosion decades earlier and sold brooms door to door — a vision of color that anticipates everything the photographer would later do with light. "I think the colors are brighter in my darkness than they are in your light," Rob tells Newt. "I see blue and red and yellow and green and all the colors." And then the blind man offers something extraordinary: "I think sometimes if all the people in the world were made up of colors like that instead of just some black and some white, it would be a wonderful world all mixed up with wonderful colored people, nobody bein' the same as anybody else." For a boy who would grow up to see the world through a lens — to insist, frame after frame, on the infinite variation of human faces and human dignity — this fictional uncle's vision of a world dissolved into color rather than divided by it reads like a prophecy. Parks put it in the novel because it mattered. Because someone in his childhood, real or composite, had planted the idea that seeing could be an act of liberation. Rob also gave the boy a philosophy about anger. In the novel, after Newt punches a white boy who calls him "nigger" while they sell brooms door to door, Rob does not lecture. He asks whether the fight was fair. He chuckles. And then he says, quietly: "Take the rest of your anger out on the piano." Art as the place where rage is converted into something the world cannot dismiss. It was the first version of the philosophy Parks would later articulate as the choice of weapons.

The town had a movie theater. Like everything else in Fort Scott, it was segregated: Black patrons sat in the balcony. Parks would later remember the experience of watching films from above, looking down at the screen at an angle that distorted the image, seeing the same stories that the white audience below saw but seeing them differently, literally from a different perspective. When he became a filmmaker fifty years later, he would direct from the floor, not the balcony. But the memory of that angle stayed with him.

When Gordon Parks was in his mid-teens, Sarah Ross Parks died. Parks himself gave the age as fourteen in Voices in the Mirror — the figure used here, since the published memoir is the primary source closest to the man's own memory. Some early biographical references give the age as eleven; documentary evidence points to a death date of May 9, 1928, which would put him at fifteen, since his birthday fell in November. The discrepancy among sources is real but ultimately unimportant. What matters is that he was a boy, and she was gone.

The sentence requires no elaboration and admits of no softening. She died. The center of his emotional universe, the voice that counterbalanced every message the segregated town delivered about his worth, was gone. Parks would write about this loss in all three of his memoirs, and in each account the language carries the weight of a wound that never fully closed.

In The Learning Tree, Parks gave Sarah Winger's death a specificity that memoir could not. The fictional mother's last words to her son became the creative manifesto Parks carried for the rest of his life: "It's another kind of world up there, Newt — hope and more promisin' things. Put — put somethin' into it — and you'll git somethin' out — simple as that." And then: "Believe in somethin' and live up to it. Be good, son. Be —" The sentence unfinished, her hand dropping to the side of the bed. Whether Sarah Ross Parks spoke these exact words, or words like them, or whether her son spent thirty-five years perfecting what she might have said, does not finally matter. What matters is that Parks needed to write them, needed to give his mother a last sentence that was also a first instruction: the charge that sent him into the world.

In the novel, Parks gave the fictionalized version of himself one last act before leaving Kansas. Newt decides to conquer his fear of death by sleeping on the floor beside his mother's open coffin. He lies in the dark, trembling, sweating. An owl hoots in the nearby woods. Crickets chirp. The whippoorwill cries. And the boy falls asleep, unafraid. His father finds him in the morning and understands: "He knew his son better than his son thought. And the look of peace on the boy's face signified something more important than his just sleeping there." The scene is Parks's most powerful image of self-transformation. The boy who had been terrified of the embalming room now lies beside his mother's body and wills himself past fear. He would carry that fearlessness into every assignment of his career: the willingness to enter dark and dangerous spaces, to stay when others would leave, to look at what others preferred not to see.

What happened next determined the trajectory of his life with the brutal efficiency of a switch thrown on a railroad track. Andrew Parks, now elderly and alone, could not manage the household. The older children were scattered. Gordon was sent to live with his older sister and her husband in St. Paul, Minnesota. A common enough arrangement: a bereaved family redistributing its youngest member to whoever could absorb him. But the arrangement failed almost immediately.

The details vary depending on which account one consults, but the essential narrative is consistent: Parks's brother-in-law did not want him. The reasons were financial, temperamental, or both. Within a short time, Parks was told to leave. Fifteen years old. A city he did not know. Winter in Minnesota.

His mother's death had removed the source of unconditional love. His ejection from his sister's home removed the last structural support of family. At fifteen, Gordon Parks was alone in the world with a grade-school education, no money, no connections, and no plan. He had the clothes he was wearing and the memory of his mother's voice.

From almost nothing, he would build one of the most extraordinary creative careers of the twentieth century. But that was later. In the winter of 1928, he was just a boy standing in the cold.

When Gordon Parks returned to Fort Scott in 1968 to film The Learning Tree, he brought a Hollywood crew, a Warner Bros. budget, and the authority of a man who had spent twenty years at the most powerful magazine in America. He stood on the streets of the town that had told him, through a thousand daily mechanisms, that his future was predetermined, and directed actors and crew with the composure of a man who had been directing his entire life.

But he also walked the east side streets alone, in the evenings after the crew had returned to the motel, and he photographed the neighborhood. The photographs he made on these walks are among the most personal of his career: images of a place seen through both the child's memory and the adult's eye, carrying the double exposure that all returns to childhood produce. The house where he was born was still standing, somewhat altered. The Attucks School building was still there, though no longer serving as a school. The AME church where Sarah Parks had taught Sunday school stood on East Oak Street, and Parks photographed it in the failing light of a Kansas autumn evening, the white clapboard gone gray in the dusk, the windows dark.

The photographs were never published during his lifetime. They are in the archive. They show what the town meant to the man who had carried it for fifty years: not a monument to suffering but a landscape of origin, the place where the eye first learned to see, where the anger first found its form, where the mother's voice first said that everything was possible.

The tension between two messages defined Gordon Parks for ninety-three years. What his mother had told him. What the town had shown him. He never resolved it. He simply kept working, kept making photographs and films and poems and music, as though the volume and quality of his output could finally answer the question Fort Scott had posed to a Black boy in the 1920s: What are you allowed to become?

His answer, delivered across eight decades and more artistic disciplines than any one person was supposed to master, was everything. But the question never stopped being asked. The boy carried the town with him the way all of us carry our first places: as a lens, the first filter through which the world became visible and through which, no matter how many other filters we later acquire, it continues to be seen.