Author’s Note

This story is about my hometown. It has another name. But it was also called “The Key City” many years ago. As a teenager in high school, I heard a strange story from a schoolmate. She said that African American slaves lived in Key City in the very early days of the city. In fact, African Americans lived on the land where her house was. It was true her house was very old. It dated from the 1840s. I always remembered that story. What were people’s lives like in the early days of the city? Why were the African Americans such a secret? I lived in Key City for twenty years. But I never heard anyone else talk about that part of the history of the city. There were no lessons on enslaved people at school. Key City was in the northern United States. I never thought enslaved people would live in the North. But of course, the truth is not always what we think it is. It is better and it is worse.

There were in fact African American and American Indian slaves in Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota as late as the 1840s. It was something hidden, even at that time. Some who owned slaves simply said they were “servants.” When it appeared that Iowa Territory would finally move against owning slaves, some slave owners quietly moved their slaves across the state line into Missouri. Slavery was allowed in Missouri and many other Southern states until the Civil War in the 1860s. When Iowa became a state in 1846 it was moving in the direction of becoming a free state. By 1849 it was against the law to hold any non-white person against their will in Iowa. This does not mean, however, that African Americans had an easy time of it in Iowa.

This is a story. It is fiction. Where I could, I found facts from histories of my hometown. I also learned about real individuals in early Key City who lived there in the 1830s. One of them, James Smith, was the great-great-great-great-grandfather of my childhood babysitter, Michelle (thank you, Michelle!). And Mr. Smith was indeed a stone mason. Father Samuel Charles Mazzuchelli was a priest and missionary on the Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin frontier. He created the foundation for the Roman Catholic faith in that area. He died in Benton, Wisconsin, in 1864 after caring for a sick church member. Today, his grave and his church can be seen in Google Maps photographs of the town. As you can see for yourself, his grave is covered by beautiful red geraniums. Other details I made up by guessing as best I could what people might have thought or said so many years ago. It was a different world. Whatever mistakes I made are mine.

My sources were:

Bennet, Mary, and Paul Juhl. Iowa Stereographs: Three-Dimensional Visions of the Past. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997.

Davis, Ronald L. F. The Black Experience in Natchez, 1720–1880: A Special History Study. Natchez: Natchez National Historical Park, 1994.

Dykstra, Robert. Bright Radical Star: Black Freedom and White Supremacy on the Hawkeye Frontier. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Lillie, Robin M., and Jennifer E. Mack. Dubuque’s Forgotten Cemetery: Excavating a Nineteenth-Century Burial Ground in a Twenty-first Century City. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015.

Schwalm, Leslie A. Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Thanks to Anthony Jahn, State Archivist, State Historical Society of Iowa, for his timely assistance. Thanks also to the editors for their eye for detail.