Harris was a bare patch in the middle of bigger patch of prairie, but folks were proud of being respectable, hard-working Christians. Great-grandma Ellis grew up there, taught in a one-room schoolhouse back when the west had more territories than states.
“We had a black doctor,” she told me once. “Real fine black doctor. ‘Course nobody went to him anymore once we got a white doctor.”
I think of him now and then, a real fine black doctor, hurriedly packing up his wagon under the moonlight, a bleak dark figure swallowed whole by the bleaker, darker prairie.
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