I am opening the book safely, putting it flat and pressing down 5 or 6 pages from the front and 5 or 6 pages from the back, over and over.
Fragments from a Writing Desk
"That truth should be silent I had almost forgot"--Enobarbus in ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, back in Rome after having been too long in Egypt.--------- Melville's PIERRE, Book 4, chapter 5: "Something ever comes of all persistent inquiry; we are not so continually curious for nothing."
Monday, March 18, 2024
Handling AN OKIE'S RACIAL RECKONINGS.
Saturday, March 16, 2024
Friday, March 15, 2024
After the murder of George Floyd--How Hershel Parker selected from his great mass of documents
An Okie's Racial Reckonings Paperback – March 11, 2024
Then on 25 May 2020 George Floyd was killed. Parker at once began pulling out files in which whites, Indians, and Blacks play crucial roles. He would not write a family history or retell episodes in American history. Instead, he could bring some of his newly discovered kinfolks to life through historical events involving race relations. Whites drove Indians out of their lands before intermarrying with some of them. A white cousin conducted the wedding of two white sisters to the Asian Siamese Twins, who owned slaves. Whites massacred other whites (among them cousins of mine) and plundered their corpses then blamed the crime on Indians. Yankees falsely accused my Southern white cousins of horrific atrocities against Blacks. A star of the Freedmen’s Bureau told lies about a cousin which are still in history books. General Sherman did his best to erase Southern history and later to erase Indian languages and lives. An elegant politician cousin forced North Carolina to give amnesty to the KKK for all its crimes. Parker’s aged relatives did not know why they were not on the Choctaw Rolls, but his research stunned him with a grotesque answer. Most newly freed Black Costners stayed in Gaston County, N. C., but enterprising Moses tried sharecropping across from King’s Mountain, took his family to Texas long after Blacks were needed or wanted there, then sought safety just across the Red River. There in 1911 white racists drove terrified Blacks away by trainloads. During this flight, the spokesman Dovey Costner made a nationwide plea to be shipped to safety in Liberia. He stayed on by the Red River, renting, but keeping the family together. In Houston a policeman cousin pistol-whipped Black women and men, causing the Riot of 1917 for which dozens of Buffalo Soldiers were hanged or imprisoned.
The family stories and historical documents here will jolt readers. Slaughter of Indians! Jefferson’s treachery to Indians! White racist violence! Murder of slaves! Murder of masters! Voter suppression! Mocking of injured veterans! This truly is An Okie’s Racial Reckonings.
Saturday, March 9, 2024
Contents of new book
CONTENTS
Introduction
1 “Goddamn Okies”: How “Okie” Became a Hate Term and
Who the Okies Really Were 29
2 Carolina Kinfolks and the War on the Cherokees,
1759–1783 37
3 Jefferson, Cocke, Indian Treaties, and the Sims Settlers 51
4 Erratic Obliviousness at Trap Hill, Wilkes County: The
Siamese Twins, the Roaring River Baptists, the Unionists,
and the Rebel Gestapo 73
5 The Mormon Massacre at Mountain Meadows, Part 1:
1850s Utah, a Military Theocracy 95
6 The Mormon Massacre at Mountain Meadows, Part 2:
Slaughtering a Wagon Train of Arkansawyers for Parley,
Brigham, and Jesus—But Holding Back a Few Orphans
for Ransom 115
7 The Wartime Adventures of Cousin Milton Sims
8 Whites, Indians, and Negroes: The Moral Trajectory
of an Innocent Texan, Jesse Wadlington Sparks 159
9 Captain J. H. Matthews: Star Witness for the Freedmen’s
Bureau, Whose Lies Became History 181
10 Cousin Fletcher Hill—Thwarted Hero and Promoter
of Veterans 191
11 Reconstruction Foes: Albion Tourgee vs.
Montford McGehee 217
12 Cousin Willy Sims Causes the Danville Massacre—
and Causes Jim Crow? 239
13 Wounded Knee: Sherman’s Shame and
Dick Costner’s Gallantry
14 A White Kentucky Martyr to White Racism 263
15 The Glenn-Tucker Lawsuit: The Jarndyce v. Jarndyce
of Indian Territory 275
16 Cousin Lee Sparks—The Mounted Policeman Who
Hastened the End of the Buffalo Soldiers: How One
Bad Cop Caused the “Largest Murder Trial in the
History of the United States” 295
17 Dovey Costner: Being Black in the Carolinas,
Texas, Indian Territory, and Oklahoma 305
Appendix: Family Stories and Documents 319
Acknowledgments
Friday, March 8, 2024
Acknowldgments
Foremost, Alma MacDougall, then Anne E. Gendler, and the cover illustrator, Marianne Jankowski. Next, the friend I have known longest, Paul Seydor, and Dr. James T. Link, who saved my right eye in 2020, just in time for me to write this book. I met the unstoppable Craig Moore several hundred times as a runner then as a walker. Two masked men, Josh Jeter and Paul McCullough, accosted me on the beach then came up to encourage me and to eat skillet bread. We had two pets, a peacock (named for the gorgeous Captain Mad Jack Percival), whom we had to abandon to roam forever over his three-state territory, and Scalini, the stray who stayed and ruled for eighteen years. “Too many to mention,” people say. James Hime. Robert Sandberg. Robbie Head. The Habers. I mention hundreds in this book whom I never met but sometimes came to love, the way I came to hear the guns at King’s Mountain. As always, Heddy-Ann Richter was stalwart.
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