Buried Truth

After the court granted permission to dig for the slave cemetery, Johnson, Warren Watkins, Kimsey and Miller decided on a date: November 3. The weather was to be sunny and unseasonably warm.

That Saturday morning, Johnson and Miller set out for the dig.

The sign by the country road reads, "KCI Motorsports Park: Future Home."

The undeveloped acres feel solemn in the morning sun. Not far from here, a farmer has taken care to plow around a stand of trees near the on-ramp for the airport. The trees conceal some bricks — all that's left of the Red Crown Tavern where Bonnie and Clyde hid out and eventually engaged in their infamous shootout with Platte County Sheriff Holt Coffey. Sometimes all that preserves history around here is a farmer with a long memory.

The periods between airplane takeoffs and landings are peaceful. Every other step disturbs grasshoppers with black wings. Sparrows wheel overhead. The fall wind bends the shoulder-high grass, making it sound as if someone is walking through the field, just out of sight. For a few moments, it's possible to forget the prairie's loud neighbor; the only reminder of the nearby airport is the gray top of the control tower peeking above the blond-and-green hills.

Johnson parks his black Jaguar just past the swinging metal cattle gate at the beginning of the country road leading to the Brightwell Cemetery. He jumps into Miller's rickety yellow truck full of equipment. A friend of Miller's is already ahead, waiting with a backhoe to sift through the first meter of dirt.

As they bounce over paths of smashed grass, Johnson suspects they should be digging in a different location. Despite the insistence of oral tradition, Miller's and Kimsey's witching rods and the red stones lined in formation, he has doubts.

A quarter-mile past the stone obelisks of the Brightwell Cemetery, they expect to find a handful of locals and some representatives from the airport. Instead, they find a cavalry.

City trucks and cars line the path. Two attorneys for the city and six airport police officers are waiting. The officials are here to keep out anyone not directly involved with the excavation (including a Pitch reporter).

Warren Watkins has already pulled up with a trailer of equipment hitched to the back of his glossy white 1977 El Camino (no funeral-home limousines today). Two more cars have followed him in, full of cameras and video equipment to document the scene.

When Kimsey arrives, her car packed with coolers full of sandwiches, airport police officer John Martinez grills her about the coolers' contents. She offers to let him search them, but he relents and lets her through.

Descendents arrive from each of the four threatened cemeteries. An airport police officer questions Bob Werline, a descendent of pioneers at Brightwell, about the person sitting in his truck. He says she is his wife — "Or, at least, she was when we left the house."

Later, Johnson will say he was surprised by the heavy security. Then again, folks are always curious about his work. "Everyone wants to go on an archaeological site. Everyone wants to get a glimpse of the grinning skeletons. You might find a pot of gold. Tutankhamen's arm might be there. Everyone thinks it's a glorified adventure. But it's a lot of work."

For this dirty job, Johnson wears a KU sweatshirt and, rather than his customary fedora, a backward-turned KU cap. Miller's pal Russ Statler operates the backhoe, taking bites out of the dirt and spitting them out slowly as Johnson watches, looking for remnants of a wooden box or pieces of hemp that might have covered the bodies of the dead when they were buried, or skeletal remains.

Two hours pass, and three colors of clay sift through the backhoe. At noon, Johnson stops the machinery. The gathering of cops, lawyers and locals goes silent and waits for his word. If remains are found, Warren Watkins has plans to receive them at the funeral home and hold onto them for DNA sampling and eventual reburial.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Johnson announces, "No one lives here. Let's cover it back up."

"Just another foot," Miller suggests. But it's not to be.

Later, Johnson will explain, "Two things happened: We either dug in the right cemetery in the wrong place, or the old oral tradition was incorrect and the coordinates were wrong. My gut feeling is, some farmer just took those stones and moved them out of the way so they could plow their crops."

Not finding anything is good, too, Johnson says. He figures he has until December 10, the court date when Shafer will decide the fate of the cemeteries, to craft a legal brief asking permission to dig in another spot. He knows exactly where.

Slaves in Little Dixie, he says, eked out a living close to the families that owned them (unlike in the South, where plantation operations were massive and used scores of slaves). Surely they would have been buried closer to their masters — not in the same cemetery but perhaps just outside the perimeter of places like Brightwell.