friars.
Along the way, he knew he wanted to become a priest. But that ambition hit a solid wall of prejudice. He was rejected by every American seminary to which he applied, even schools that trained white priests to serve the black community. Supporters believed so strongly in his calling that they applied for him to study at Pontifical Urbaniana University in Rome. Eventually he was accepted, with the understanding he likely would be sent to Africa or New Guinea as a missionary.
Instead, in a move that disappointed Augustine, the Vatican sent him back to Quincy, amid the same racism and hate he had endured as a child. Yet the young priest quickly became well-known as Father Gus, with a reputation for giving inspirational sermons at St. Joseph Negro Church, where his powerful messages attracted an audience of blacks and whites alike.
Again, Father Gus heard protests about mixing races. He felt the heat from white citizens who targeted his ministry and even a few black preachers who bristled at his success. Some of the strongest protests actually came from the local Catholic Church hierarchy, who told him to stop taking money from white parishioners for his black church. Further, they ordered him to minister “only to Negroes.”
Not long after, Father Gus angered the gentrified community by agreeing to perform a wedding ceremony between a society girl and, according to the girl’s mother, an “unacceptable” person. Eventually Father Gus, his local superiors and the Vatican all agreed it was time for him to move on.
So he moved to Chicago, where the archbishop gave him “full pastoral jurisdiction” over the more than 27,000 blacks who lived in the city during the late 1880s. Augustine’s calm demeanor, punctuated by a passionate speaking voice, again attracted blacks and whites to his sermons.
On a hot summer day in 1897, he was returning from a retreat south of Chicago when he succumbed to the 105-degree heat and collapsed on a Chicago street. Hospital records say he died of heat exhaustion and uremia. Many of his contemporaries believe he worked himself to death. He was 43 years old.
As he requested, he is buried in a Quincy cemetery for priests. Yet prejudice followed him to his grave. He was buried deep in the ground to allow another priest’s coffin to be interred above his. Yet now the Catholic Church is considering him for sainthood.
Today the little church where Augustine Tolton was baptized appears to have survived its painful period of neglect, thanks to a spirited rescue effort powered by one lady. I remember how that rescue came together.
A dozen years ago, speaking to a cultural heritage conference in St. Louis, I asked attendees if they knew about Augustine Tolton or where he lived. None did.
But after the event, one lady asked me for directions to the little church. Her name was Gwendolyn Crimm, and at the time she worked as the ethnic coordinator for the Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis.
A year later, my family was on a Memorial Day tour of graveyards when we rolled up the long path through a canopy of tall cedars, into the St. Peter’s Church grounds. There was Gwen Crimm with a dozen young scouts from St. Louis chopping brush, mowing grass and painting the trim on the church. For Gwen, this was just the first step.
The next year, the church had a new roof, and the interior was restored. The bishop said a mass at the tiny church. On that Sunday morning, the scores of visitors were greeted by something else: Several dozen simple wooden crosses stood atop the unmarked graves on the perimeter of the cemetery. Those are the graves of the slaves who lived and worked in the farms and fields around the parish. Locals say one mass grave contains as many as 30 bodies—victims of a deadly cholera epidemic.
Father Augustine Tolton’s bones lie in nearby Quincy. But his influence extends well beyond that, reaching out from his roots in tiny St. Peter’s Church, where Monroe and Ralls counties meet along a line of unmarked graves.
The Dinner Table
Taking the Highway 15 exit ramp off the Avenue of the Greats, I can get to anywhere in tiny Shelbina in five minutes, as long as a freight train isn’t crawling through the middle of town.
It wasn’t, and that was a good thing because the chime on my radio signaled it was straight-up noon, and as the newscaster began his first story, I knew lunch was already on the table.
From different directions, Robert Shoemyer and I arrived at the table at the same time. We exchanged greetings as we sat down to the glorious task of absorbing a 15-course meal. Robert is a family friend—and my hero. He farms for a living. And like most folks who toil the whole time the sun is watching, he stays young behind his weather-beaten face that looks all the more leathery as he sits hatless across the table from me, his balding pate a pasty white above a tan line as stark as the rustline in a porcelain tub. That tan line is testament to five dozen seasons on the seat of a tractor, sowing soybeans and feeding cattle. Robert has the energy and the enthusiasm of a kid despite his 75 years. He owes his stamina to early rising and hard work and clean living, but mostly to his companion for 50-some odd years.
Dorothy Shoemyer’s kitchen table looks like a Grandma Moses painting. Everything is on it. Everything. Her face would be on the label of the grocery-store package that says “grandma’s home cooking,” if there was such a package. Robert and I dug into a home-grown, sit-down, all-you-can-eat, family-style, “don’t stop now because there’s only a spoonful of cottage cheese left and finish up those peaches ’cause I can’t keep up with ’em fallin’ off the trees and here, have some more fried chicken ’cause there’s not enough room to put all this stuff back in the fridge” dinner from Dorothy Shoemyer’s kitchen table, featuring beef and gravy and new potatoes with green beans from the garden and sliced home-grown tomatoes and cucumbers from her garden, too, and corn and relish and pickled beets and bread and butter.
Robert watched me coax the last drops of chocolate syrup out of a Hershey’s squirt bottle onto a dish of vanilla ice cream. I worked the squeeze bottle like a bellows, violently expelling a few drops of syrup in a flatulent whoosh, then waited as the air wheezed back into the plastic bottle.
“Give it here,” Robert said. He grabbed the squeeze bottle and decapitated it, held it in one hand and a gallon milk jug in the other. He poured milk into the syrup bottle.
“Chocolate milk,” he explained,“ and I don’t even have to dirty a glass.” Dorothy Shoemyer chuckled as she flitted like a hummingbird from stove to table to sink.
“More ice cream?” she asked.
“No, thanks,” I demurred, as I watched Robert shake his squirt bottle to make his chocolate milk. I was stuffed. It’s rare that a weary road traveler gets a home-cooked meal, especially for lunch.
Robert’s work ethic is impressive, and he’s married to Saint Cook. But that’s not why he’s my hero. Robert finds a use for everything. Or a short cut. And I knew that as soon as he finished his chocolate milk, the squeeze bottle would find the recycling bin. This lunch was a refreshing oasis in my sojourn through this big, throwaway world.
Back on the Avenue of the Greats, I was still three hours away, as the crow flies, from St. Joseph. Damn the crows. My hands and my wheels worked together to steer me through the landscape like a trackless Tilt-A-Whirl. The trip was a dream for a guy who battles attention deficit disorder. And in the beginning, when nothing lay before me but untraveled roads, I didn’t obsess about completing the long journey. Truth is, I really didn’t have a plan or a system to reach this fuzzy, forming goal of driving everywhere. But I kept track, marking my map, taking notes, dodging turtles and squirrels, stray calves and texters. I chipped away at my map, line by squiggly line.
Along
