Ivan McClellan - Finding My Place

 

I was born and raised in Kansas City, Kansas. Go Chiefs. All right. The neighborhood that I grew up in had many sides. It was urban and country at the same time. It was beautiful, and sometimes it could be terrifying. My sister and I would run around in a five-acre field behind our house. All summer long, we would play and we would eat blackberries until our fingers were sticky and then we'd run home through the thistle, pick thorns out of our socks on the front porch. And then at twilight, the lightning bugs would come out and we'd scoop them up in mason jars, throw some leaves in there, screw the lid on tight, poke holes in the top, so they could breathe. 

 

At night, some nights, gunshots would ring out on the block. And my sister and I would lay on the floor and look up as the police helicopters lit up the street, looking for suspects. There were a lot of gangs in the neighborhood and they would walk around with pit bulls. Whenever they ran across a rival gang member, they would fight their dogs. I wasn't in a gang. I was a nerd and a church kid. But when I ran across this one guy, he would sic his dog on me. I would go running and all the backs of my pants got eaten up and I got really fast. [audience laughter] 

 

My mom worked two or three jobs to keep us fed. We were latchkey kids. And we determined it was unsafe to go outside, so we quit going out in that field and playing. As I got closer to the end of high school, my prospects were kind of slim. I could go be a delivery truck driver, I could be a pastor at my uncle's church, or I could go work at the assembly line at the Ford plant. I didn't really want to do any of those things. I wanted to be a photographer. And so, I decided I was going to figure out a way out of Kansas. I never felt like I fit in there, and I knew somewhere there was a community where I belonged. 

 

So, I saved up $500 that summer and I just upped and moved to New York City. And that money was gone in a week. [audience laughter] And I just worked any job that I could get. I didn't know anybody. So, I handed out flyers, I blew up balloons, I played guitar in the park. Anything I could do for money. Until some way through a bunch of luck, I got a job as a photographer and a junior designer at an ad agency. I didn't know anything that anybody was talking about. They would say, “ROI, SEO KPIs.” I would just nod my head and google what they had said. 

 

I did that long enough that I actually started to get pretty good at my job and I got promoted. I went from junior designer to designer. And I went from designer to senior designer. And from senior designer to art director. Every time that I got promoted, I saw fewer and fewer black people around. Until I got a job as a creative director, I moved to Portland, Oregon, and I hardly ever saw black people at all. 

 

Like, I was in this sea of white men at work. I was never a culture fit. Like, I understood their culture, but they had no clue who Luther Vandross was. Or, they had never stayed up till 02:00 AM watching Showtime at the Apollo. They had no idea why I might be afraid of dogs. This led to a case of imposter syndrome. I felt like I didn't belong in the rooms that I was in, that I was going to be found out, thrown out in the street, forced to move back to Kansas. 

 

One day I was at a party. I didn't know anybody there, except for the person whose birthday it was. And so, I was just drinking by myself and sulking in the corner. Somebody tapped me on the shoulder and I turned around. And there's a tall black man with a salt and pepper Afro. He introduces himself. He says his name is Charles Perry. Says he's a filmmaker. I say, “Oh, I'm a photographer. What are you working on?” He said, “I'm working on a movie about black cowboys.” I said, “What, like a Western?” He said, “No, like a documentary.” I laughed. I was like, “Oh, there's not enough black cowboys to make a whole documentary.” 

 

Like, I knew a thing or two about cowboys. Like, I grew up watching Bonanza and Gunsmoke and Lonesome Dove reruns. Like, my school choir used to sing the National Anthem at the American Royal Rodeo in Kansas. I viewed the cowboy to be the archetype of American independence and grit. But black cowboys, the only black cowboys I knew were Sheriff Bart in Blazing Saddles [audience laughter] and Cowboy Curtis on Pee Wee's Playhouse. [audience laughter] So, we kept talking. And he said, “Well, you got to see it for yourself, man. Come with me to a black rodeo in Oklahoma this summer.” I said, “Absolutely.” 

 

It was exactly the opportunity that I had been looking for. Like, I had never felt more separated from black culture. And going to a rodeo seemed like the furthest thing from working at a computer that I could think of. And so, I went home and I bought my plane ticket and I just sat there for the next few months, anticipating what this could possibly be like. In my head, it was like Soul Train, but everybody was on a horse. [audience laughter] 

 

So August came around, and I caught my flight to Oklahoma City, I drove an hour and a half to Okmulgee. Parked my car, got out and got just suffocated by 105-degree. It was 105 degrees. It was 100% humidity. As I was walking through the grass, chiggers were biting my ankles and there were grasshoppers jumping up on my clothes. There was just a haze of barbecue smoke over the entire lawn. I couldn't breathe. And everywhere I looked, there was a white horse trailer glistening in the sun. 

 

There was R&B music, and gospel music and hip hop coming out of the trailers. And everywhere around me, there were black cowboys. Thousands of them. I saw young men riding their horses with no shirt, a gold chain, basketball shorts and Jordans. And they were walking up, hitting on women and talking trash to the other riders. I saw old men just sitting stoically on their horses. They had precise Stetsons and trim, mustaches, pinky rings. And their shirts were so starched, you could hear them crunch when they moved their arms. And the women bedazzled from head toe. Bedazzled hats, bedazzled shirts with fringe, bedazzled jeans. They had long braids and acrylic nails. They were settling down, these muscular quarter horses. They were going to be riding 40 miles per hour in the barrel race later that afternoon. 

 

Like, I couldn't have fit in any less. I was wearing khakis and wingtips. [audience laughter] But I felt so welcomed by this group of people. Everybody was so eager to share a smile. Let me take their photo and share their story. I met a man named Robert Crif. Robert had this leather raisin of a face. He had this beautiful horse named Summertime. He pulled on her reins, and she put her legs down on the ground like she was bowing. It was so elegant. He shook my hand. He had these 12-grit sandpaper hands. Mine almost started to bleed, because I've got dragonfly wings for hands [audience laughter] from working in tech for so long. 

 

He offered me a bottle of water, which I desperately needed at this point, because I'm like soaking wet. He has had not a bead of sweat on his face. In fact, nobody else at the rodeo was sweating at all. And I looked like I had just gotten baptized. [audience laughter] So, he was wearing a Kansas City hat. So, I said, “Where you from?” He said, “I'm from Kansas City, Kansas.” I said, I'm from Kansas City, Kansas. Whereabout?” He said, “Oh, I live just off of 58th in Georgia.” I grew up off of 57th in Georgia. It turns out that he lived on the other side of the five-acre field from where I grew up. I never saw a horse back there, I never met Robert Crif. But he knew my grandma. He knew my pastor. We went to the same high school. In fact, he told me that half of the people at the rodeo come down from Kansas City every year for their family reunions. 

 

I was embarrassed. I felt silly, because this entire culture was right under my nose my whole life, and I knew nothing about it. I felt ripped off, because I was hanging out with these criminals, chasing me with their dog, and I could have been hanging out with cowboys a field away. It immediately changed my perception of home away from a place of pain and poverty and violence, to a place of independence and grit and cowboys. I was proud to be from there.

 

The rodeo started and a rider rode around the arena carrying a flag, a Pan-African flag. It's the American flag, but it's red, black and green. And a singer belted out lift every voice and sing. She sang it with so much sincerity and so much energy that I heard it for the first time. She said, “Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us.” Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.” And that, to me, was what this rodeo was about. What we have been forced to do in slavery, work the land, work with animals. We could now do in a celebratory mood for our own profit and our own entertainment. 

 

I photographed that rodeo with absolute joy. I got home, and I looked at the photos, and I was just blown back by all of the vibrance and all of the energy and the fashion. It was like I had gone to Oz. Clicked my heels back to gray, homogenous Portland. But I had proof that I had been there. My favorite photo is of this rodeo queen. Her name is Jasmine Marie. I asked her to take her photo, and she stands there and throws her hair off of her shoulders. She's standing there with her chin up, and her hair blowing back and her crown is glistening in the stadium lights. She looks like actual royalty. 

 

I love all of these photos. Whenever I'm feeling separated from the culture, I just open them up and look through them and I'm immediately taken back to Okmulgee. I go back every year. I've taken my family with me. I've been to dozens of black rodeos around the country. My work has been featured in museums, it's been featured in magazines and published in a book. I've seen the figure of the black cowboy elevated in film and television. It's become a part of a narrative about identities in the West. But I do this, so that my kids, when they draw a picture of a cowboy, they'll color it in with a brown face. I do it, so that I'll never again forget that this is a part of who I am as a black man in America. Thank you.