Normally I write books with contracts in hand but last Spring I tried to interest several Oklahoma presses in a book I have not yet written, though I have performed masses of research for it. I am convinced that the reason every press rejected it (once by instantly returned email) was the word Okie in the subtitle: ORNERY PEOPLE: WHAT WAS A DEPRESSION OKIE?
Dear
Director:
I
want to approach you about a peculiarly Oklahoman project, one that needs the
enthusiastic support of the director. I am planning a book that answers the
question, “What Was a Depression Okie?” Its title is ORNERY PEOPLE.
My
ancestry must be representative of that of many hundreds or thousands of
Oklahomans. Statistically I find that I am kin not merely to many thousands of
Americans but the low millions, for all of my white ancestors came in the 17th
and 18th centuries (the last in 1750, the Costners) and had enormous
families and those children had enormous families on down into the early 20th
century. One of my Mississippi double cousins (found on the Internet this year,
a Costner and a Bell) says that all Southerners are connected, even if they are
not kin. I find that to be true as I see so many familiar and family names
recurring in genealogies. I am truly a representative Oklahoman, and a
surviving Depression Okie.
I
would not call ORNERY PEOPLE a prequel to GRAPES OF
WRATH (although I cannot take that book seriously as a portrait of eastern
Oklahoma). Still, without too much hyperbole ORNERY PEOPLE could be marketed as
the story which shows how American Southerners got to the point where Steinbeck
took up the fictional Joads. Please let me try to interest you.
On
paper I look like a regular sort of academic. I am H. Fletcher Brown Professor at the University
of Delaware, Professor Emeritus since
my retirement in 1998. I am a Pulitzer finalist for the first volume of my
biography of Herman Melville (1997) and the winner of the highest award in
biography from the Association of American Publishers for each of the two
volumes of my biography of Melville, in 1997 and 2003. I’ve held a Guggenheim
Fellowship and have published books with Johns Hopkins, LSU, Cambridge, G. K.
Hall, Michigan, and other presses, but most commonly with Northwestern
University Press. I taught at Illinois, Northwestern, the University of
Southern California, and Delaware. My work has been in textual scholarship,
aesthetics, and biography. I have in fact gone against the grain of the
dominant New Criticism and later the New Historicism, not out of pure
orneriness, I trust, but simply from an inclination to work with manuscript
evidence and other original documents whenever possible. You could check me
(Hershel Parker, no “c” in my first name) in Wikipedia or Bookfinder or Google
Books or Amazon.
I
was born near Comanche, Oklahoma, in 1935, son of a woman born in Guymon,
Oklahoma Territory, and a father born in Wister, Choctaw Nation, Indian
Territory. My first years were in an oil field near the Rio Grande until my
father lost his job and had bad trouble finding another. The first winter of
the war we lived in a tent (outdoor toilet, spigot for water outside the tent),
in sight of the new DuPont Powder Plant near Pryor, Oklahoma, until the
well-remembered cyclone destroyed the school. (Ironically my chair at Delaware
[1979-1998] was endowed by a DuPont in-law.) My parents worked in ship yards in
Portland, Oregon, then moved to a farm in LeFlore County, Oklahoma, outside
Wister. In 1952 I left high school after the 11th grade so I could
help support the family, at first working as an apprentice telegrapher at Red
Rock, Oklahoma, where hooks still held tickets on which towns were identified
not as in Oklahoma but as in IT or OT. I had seven years seniority as a
railroad telegrapher on the Kansas City Southern when I quit in 1959 to go to
Northwestern on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. During that time I was sick for
two years with tuberculosis but accumulated college credits by correspondence
from the Universities of Oklahoma, California, and Texas, and finished at Lamar
State College of Technology in Beaumont (“with highest honors”) after two years
of working 8 at night till 4 in the morning on the KCS Railway in Port Arthur
and going to school in the day. After getting my BA from Lamar in 1959 I took
the MA in 1960 and PhD in 1963, both from Northwestern.
Late
in 2002, three years after my mother, Martha Costner Parker, died at 92, I
realized that I knew only two bits about any of any of my great grandparents.
Mother’s grandfather Bell had enjoyed saying, in northern Mississippi, “I’m
Scotch-Irish and Damn Yankee!” Three generations back, his Bell ancestor was a
Scot from Ireland, all right, but he was never a Yankee. One of his brothers had
been in the Confederacy, and survived a Yankee prison. My Great Grandfather
Bell must have been ornery indeed, for that to be his favorite phrase.
The
other story I knew was that my father’s Parker grandfather had been so poor
that as a child of five or six or seven he ran deadfalls in the winter snow in
northern Mississippi barefoot, carrying a heated rock in a tow sack. He would
drop the sack and warm his feet while he reset the trap, then run on to the
next until the rock was cold. I understood this only when I learned his birth
year, 1860, and learned that his father had disappeared before the 1870 census,
and that half the men and boys in Fulton Township were dead or had disappeared
by the end of the war. I knew nothing else, not one other anecdote, and assumed
that there would be no written record of people so impoverished for so long.
Late
in 2002 I decided to stop working on Melville for two months to see what I
could find on the Internet about my family. I was astonished at how many
written documents I found, right away, about many of my American ancestors.
Merely by searching on the Internet, accumulating books, and corresponding with
Internet cousins, I have over the last several years amassed such a great deal
of evidence that I am at the brink of the writing stage rather than the
accumulation stage. I call the book ORNERY PEOPLE because I am recalling and
celebrating such a tough bunch. A few years ago I wrote what could be the first
chapter, my experiences as an Okie up to the point I decided to find out what a
Depression Okie really was. I think that’s in readable shape now.
Some
of the ancestors, I discovered, were wealthy landowners in Maryland: one of them
seems to have passed on much of Silver Springs in his will. Recently I learned
that from some of those Maryland ancestors I am 6th cousin to the
wife of my chairman at USC all through the 1970s and that we are, to our
chagrin, akin to the Warfields, even Wallis Warfield Simpson. We never knew we
were related! There are other startling well-documented connections to English
families (who would not want Jane Austen for a cousin?), but my focus is all
American. Within one or two generations such people as the prosperous
Marylanders and Virginians were frontiersmen and women, often illiterate.
One GGGGG Grandfather was a North
Carolina Regulator in the months before the Battle of Alamance. About a dozen
of my ancestors, mainly Scots and Germans, were in the Revolution, including a
son of the Regulator. How proud I would have been in youth and all my life, had
I known! Another GGGGG Grandfather (well, they were Scots, so he is doubly a
GGGGG Grandfather), who had daringly been on a North Carolina Committee of
Safety, led his clan at King’s Mountain, that “turning point of the war in the
South” Three anecdotes survive online of this GGGGG Grandfather’s
sister’s riding 12 miles on an unruly stallion through Tory territory the next
day, a Sunday, afraid that her husband and son were dead, only to find all her
Presbyterian menfolk playing cards and passing a jug around. She stayed to
nurse other men who were wounded.
Many
of my ancestors are listed as the first whites in an area (even to the point of
being “intruders” more than once). One family is well documented as the “Sims
[or Simms] Intruders” who took flatboats down the Elk River into Alabama before
it was opened to whites, only to be burned out twice by soldiers from Fort
Hampton, Tennessee, despite, the second time, their letter (in the National
Archives) begging President “Maddison” not to send the soldiers again. After
their cabins were burned and their crops chopped down, they went over the
Tennessee line and survived the winter in shelters made from bark of old growth
trees, so that the place was called Barksville. A centennial history writer
remembered seeing the shelters, and gave a sense of what living inside them was
like.
The
Coker family is extensively documented online by the Silas C. Turnbo papers in
the Springfield-Greene County Library, Springfield, Missouri. My GGGGG
Grandfather William (Buck) Coker arrived there (they learned months later) on
the day of the Battle of New Orleans, so his arrival date passed down in the
family. Sons had been there earlier, as was usual, preparing the way. Turnbo
records stories of panthers, bears (Aunt Kate and children under the puncheon
floor as the bear pawed at it), snakes, and very rough people. I had known
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s book on his travels as a source for Longfellow, but
had not known to make anything of the fact that one of his hosts is “Mr.
Coker,” who has bear skins strung on rods all around his house, inside and out,
and who has not a single vegetable in his diet.
I
knew from dark great aunts of their grievance at being left of the Choctaw
rolls. One of them lived in three centuries, but not very long in two of them,
dying in 2001. Their white father recited the Lord’s Prayer in Choctaw before
every meal. I remember this man, who was born in 1861. Until I began looking on
the Internet I had no idea that the Glenn-Tucker case was notorious, the
Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce of the Indian Territory. A history published just after statehood
jibes at it. I have printed out the long, intricate decision on “GLENN-TUCKER,
et al., v. CLAYTON, Judge. / Court of Appeals of Indian Territory, Sept. 25,
1902” from the Southwestern
Reporter,
Volume 70--an example of what riches is available for free on the Internet. The
story of how the Glenn-Tucker family was cheated of their Indian rights is a
true story of Ornery People. They stopped along the way to give birth, harvest
a crop, and, worst, did not know that the Arkansas line had been moved west.
Their history is documented not only with legal records but also by affidavits
my cousins gave in the 1880s before the Dawes Commission about events in the
1830s and earlier. There is even a WPA oral interview with a Glenn-Tucker
cousin! And it is documented in even my memory, for in 1990 at an aunt’s 90th
birthday another aunt lamented her exclusion from the rolls.
I
am a Glenn and Tucker two ways. One Coker girl (part Glenn and Tucker), having
escaped with another child from a bushwacking in northern Arkansas, made her
way to a much older Mexican War veteran cousin in Dade Co., Missouri, John B.
E. Glenn, newly a widower, who said she could stay if she married him. He had
proved his orneriness by volunteering for a year in the Union army even though
Abraham Lincoln had received only a handful of votes in Dade County. In 1942
and after the Second World War in Wister I knew a son of this Mexican War
soldier. The soldier was described on his discharge paper as 6 ft 5 inches,
Scot and Cherokee. (I have followed his service through newspaper archives I
have access to through Delaware.) Uncle Johnny (my great granduncle) must also
have been that tall, and topped himself with a black stovepipe hat as he
brought early spring vegetables to help feed us after the Pryor cyclone, my
father having gone ahead to Oregon. Uncle Johnny was very dark indeed, with
Choctaw blood as well as Cherokee blood from the northern Arkansas Cokers who
took up with Cherokees. There’s a good story about Cherokees chasing Uncle Joe
because he had one too many wives, the story of how Poor Joe Hill got its name.
My Parker grandmother was very dark, although she was more than half white. One
of her daughters was always called Blanket. I was middle-aged before I learned
that she came out so dark that they decided they should wrap her in a blanket
and drop her off at a Reservation. Okie humor.
One group of 150 Richardsons and
in-laws left Moore Co., North Carolina, in ox-drawn wagons, carrying everything
including livestock—over the mountains, and by Knoxville, where the patriarch
died and was buried on the roadside. Their arrival in Lauderdale Co. Alabama,
around 1820, maybe as late as 1823, is recorded in a long letter written in the
1870s. One healthy lad who gloried in the excitement of the months-long trip
died in an Alton prison in the Civil War because he would not take a loyalty
oath while his sons were in the CSA. Aunt Kate Stutts Richardson rode a horse
all the way from Moore County, and in her great age (the family swears) she
killed a Yankee with a stick of firewood when he leaned into her apple barrel.
In 2007 I saw in several of the family cemeteries tombs of grandsons of the
1820 troop slain in the war. The brevity of time between the Revolution and the
Civil War is never so clear as when you see so many graves of grandchildren of
Revolutionary patriots slain in another war. And now, of course, in these
cemeteries there are stark new graves with the Iraq dead, some with the family
names.
Many of my mother’s people were
German, Pennsylvania Dutch, including the Costners, the last-comers, most of
whom went down the Great Wagon Road to North Carolina very soon. Two brothers,
sons of a Confederate private who survived Gettysburg (many cousins did not),
went out to Guymon, OT, my grandfather and Mother’s Uncle Mode (Moses Amariah),
great grandfather of the actor, Kevin Costner. In 2007 when we knocked on a
door in Dallas, North Carolina, to ask directions to a Costner cemetery the man
who opened the door was Clyde Costner, on land that had been in the family more
than two centuries. Most of us moved west fast. Thomas W. Bell, a grandson of
two of the King’s Mountain men, got to the Republic of Texas in time to be
“captured in the cause of Texas” and to write a book (1845), A NARRATIVE OF THE
CAPTURE AND SUBSEQUENT SUFFERINGS OF THE MIER PRISONERS IN MEXICO. An author in
the family, my first cousin four times removed!
I am using Revolutionary pension
records to reconstruct significant bits of military history from the ground up,
comparing my long-lived ancestors’ stories with those of others who had served
in the same companies. (One of my GGGG grandfathers applied for his pension
when he was over 90, and received it.) The book will trace migration patterns;
treatment of slaves (there’s a horrific pre-Revolution “William Zan[t]zinger”
record of a Pottenger uncle’s killing a young male slave and being questioned
but not punished); the reasons for shifts in religious affiliations (some Boyd
cousins were famous South Carolina Methodist preachers, a Hill ancestor was a
circuit rider in Alabama and Mississippi); the immediate and long-term effects
of the Civil War; the descent into poverty that ran from the Civil War on
through the Dust Bowl (my parents were in Spearman, Texas, during the worst of
it) and the Depression, which I remember. (I remember the horrors of joblessness
in 1939.)
I will write about using Internet
resources wisely, as in the strategies by which I learned that my grand aunt
had been wrong in 1990 when she said her father was “a full-blooded Irishman
who didn’t talk plain.” I assumed she meant he was fresh off the boat, there,
inexplicably, in Indian Territory. In fact, he was Scottish, Scotch-Irish, born
in Arkansas of parents born in Tennessee, just as you would expect if you did
not believe everything an aunt said. How I tracked his family back will make a
good paragraph or two. He was illiterate, and may not have talked as plain as
my eastern Oklahoma aunt, but he was not a full-blooded Irishman.
I will take issue with points in some
standard histories of periods and movements, for I find that American history
is still written mainly by Northerners for Northerners, who know there was a
Boston Massacre but know nothing of Battle of Alamance and hangings that
followed. ORNERY PEOPLE will recount the dispersal of families and, oddly, it
will celebrate the reconnecting of families through the Internet. This year I
saw for the first time a photograph of my Henderson great grandparents: that’s
an example of the Internet reuniting families. Another example: on email with
an Internet Cockerham cousin I was identifying a mutual ancestor when he asked
my other names and when I listed some he instantly said, “Well, we are
certainly both Schlemps!” And it turns out that I envy one of the Schlemps, for
while he was in Coolidge’s cabinet he got to meet John Buchan, one of my
favorite writers.
In ORNERY PEOPLE I will celebrate the
serious historical work of many amateur genealogists whose respect for the
rules of evidence puts many academics to shame. All my academic life I worked
in the archives, transcribing manuscripts myself; now I perforce rely on others
for much of the research, but the odd thing is that more and more manuscript
material is showing up online, such as letters from men in my Great Grandfather
Costner’s Mississippi regiment.
I write fast, as a professional. I
wrote the 400-page MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE (now in press at
Northwestern) between May 2009 and May 2010, had to let it rest to push on
other projects, then finished it between May 2011 and the end of September
2011. I expect to write ORNERY PEOPLE in a year or so once I start, perhaps
two, allowing for interruptions on other projects. As I said, I am recognizing
the tension which means “Enough accumulating: time to look hard and start
writing.”
Normally I blaze away writing what I
want to write, but I would like to write ORNERY PEOPLE with a press in mind so
as to adapt it to best fit the needs of the press. I would like an Oklahoma press
to publish it, if I can find one as enthusiastic about the project as I am.
I can publish it elsewhere, even in
these hard times. Northwestern published one of my books, THE POWELL PAPERS, in
July 2011, besides the bigger MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY which is set for 2012. I have
other commercial projects in the works, as you can see from the appended list
of what I have published after retiring in 1998. I have no scruples, now, about
self-publishing or publishing on Kindle: everything has changed, you know
better than I do, and in many ways for the good, I believe. Nevertheless, I
want you to have first refusal of ORNERY PEOPLE because it is quintessentially
an Oklahoma book. It would mean a great deal to me to have it published and
promoted in Oklahoma.
Sincerely,
Hershel
Parker
2900
Juniper Avenue
Morro
Bay, CA 93442
This
will not be a grim book. There will be many anecdotes such as this one:
Cousin L. M. Hoffman tells this story about
Cousin Cephas Bell, a Confederate soldier in the 28th North Carolina
Regiment, a grandson of the King’s Mountain hero Thomas Costner:
“His comrades say of him that he was not
unusually bright but that he was unusually brave. On one occasion his command
was ordered to charge the enemy entrenched on a hill. The Federals scattered in
confusion and Bell leading in the rush did not notice that his command had
halted in the enemy’s abandoned position but went on after an officer in the
rear of the rout. He overtook his man and ordered him to surrender. The officer
said he couldn’t surrender except to an officer. Bell swore at him and said
he’d blow out his d----d brains if he didn’t surrender quick . . . . He took
his prisoner back and meeting some officers as he approached headquarters they
told him they’d take the prisoner. He said, ‘No you won’t; if you want to go
get you one, there’s plenty of them over there [pointing in the direction
the enemy had gone]. You shall not have mine.’”
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