Roots Revival

For a town of 22 people, the crowd seems unimaginable. Nearly a thousand people are crammed along the shoulders of Rural Route J, awaiting the start of the Dalton Day parade. A woman grabs a mic and throws herself into "The Star Spangled Banner," trilling out the last line for a good ten or twelve seconds.

Mayor Donny Hughes waves to the crowd from the open windows of a black luxury sedan. Firemen blast the siren on their massive truck. Kids scurry behind a pack of Cub Scouts lobbing bubble gum in the air. Shriners scoot along in puny fire engines, and members of Allah Temple No. 6 ride black mountain bikes. A daredevil tilts his dune buggy and swerves around on two wheels.

Then come the show cars. A hulking SUV loaded with a funky hydraulic shock system appears to dance down the road. It's followed by a gold-trimmed Acura Legend cut to ride just a few inches above the ground, then an Olds 442 convertible with a flawless burgundy paint job and gold-spoked rims. There are a red Olds 88 with a gold steering wheel and two white convertible Cadillacs with gold insignia plates, gold hood ornaments, gold mirrors and gold door handles. Each car has its stereo cranked. Throbbing bass riffs vibrate the teeth of onlookers.

This is the twelfth annual Dalton Day parade. "We had a two-minute parade that first year," remembers Charlene Jackson of Kansas City, who helped start the event in 1989. "There were just some kids on cars. One guy had his truck decorated. We had maybe ten people standing on the side of the road. Most of them were laughing."

The next year, those ten people came back to find themselves standing among a bigger crowd. "Every year, somebody brought somebody else, and it just blossomed," Jackson says.

Dalton is stranded in the soggy floodplain of the Missouri River. To find it, drive east on Independence Avenue for about two hours and turn right a mile or so past the "World's Biggest Pecan," a concrete nut the size of an Airstream trailer. On the Saturday before Memorial Day, you'll find people from all over -- Moberly, Marshall, Boonville, St. Louis, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, California, Wyoming. They're all enjoying the sun, discovering new cousins and swaying to the O'Jays, the Temptations and Bloodstone.

And, much to Jackson's delight, they're knocking back $1 beers and shelling out six bucks each for plates of deep-fried catfish, baked beans and potato salad. That's the main reason for Dalton Day: to raise money. Jackson and her uncle, Maurice Hughes, came up with the idea to try to save the cemetery where their ancestors are buried.

About eighteen people join hands in the add-on room of a ranch house north of Swope Park. Wilene Lewis closes her eyes and belts out a long prayer that crescendos to an arm-shaking conclusion: "There are so many people who have come down on us, dear Lord! But we have made it this far, dear Lord! We have come this far by faith, and we ask that you bless us, Jesus! Amen."

The gathered take their places around the room on couches and recliners and extra chairs pulled in from the dining room and the patio. Maurice Hughes, who wears a trim white mustache, calls to order this year's second meeting of the Dalton Day staff.

It's a Saturday night in mid-March, and some of the attendees appear to be afflicted with spring fever. At times, the discussions grow lively, with a few of the older ladies shouting out-of-turn, though the agenda is decidedly mundane. (One of the items is whether to offer fruit drinks for the kids.) Lewis, who doesn't at all look her 67 years, stands up and argues passionately for Busch Light, not Bud Light. Hughes raises his hand and tries to calm her.

Small eruptions aside, Hughes keeps the meeting on track with the help of his niece, Charlene Jackson. She sits at a card table in the corner, reading aloud occasionally from the group's financial reports. Her glasses ride low on her nose, and she tilts her head so she doesn't have to look through them when she addresses her colleagues across the room. One by one, the items on the agenda fall, and suddenly a line forms in the kitchen.

They fill plastic plates and bowls with chili and hot dogs and snap open the tabs on beer cans. Crown Royal splashes over ice cubes. The air fills with hollers and hoots as people bound by blood and geography fold themselves into a cozy corner of Kansas City. "We're a close-knit people, a close family," Jackson says of her fellow Daltonites. "And I know that comes from being from Dalton. Because in the city, I have so many people I know who have no connection to their families."

Blacks first set foot in Missouri early in the eighteenth century as the property of Frenchmen who were following the Mississippi and Missouri rivers into the wilds of the New World. More than likely, Jackson, Hughes and their fellow Daltonites are descendants of slaves who toiled on homesteads scattered across the Missouri River Valley, known then as Little Dixie. Missouri's relatively short growing season yielded an abundance of hemp, tobacco, wheat, oats, hay and corn. Chariton County, where Dalton rests, claimed the second-highest population of slaves in antebellum Missouri.