"Goddamn Okies" and the Loss and Retrieval of
Historical Memory
Copyright 2020 Hershel
Parker
In
the mid-1930s, journalists did not know where the refugees or migrants
streaming into California were coming from. From the “Dust Bowl,” said many,
not realizing that the true Dust Bowl was pretty much restricted to the
panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and the adjacent areas in those states and to
northeast New Mexico, southeast Colorado, and southwest Kansas. Journalists did
not know, either, that far from everyone who left the Dust Bowl actually went
to California. On 14 July 1937 the San Bernardino County Sun under
the headline “70,000 ‘Dust Bowl’ Refugees Homeless in San Joaquin Valley”
identified the newcomers as from Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, but although
Arkansas had suffered drought it was not in the Dust Bowl. On 25 July 1937
the Fresno Bee reported concern about “the influx of middle
westerners and dust bowl refugees”—maybe 1,000,000 of them, but did not
particularize “middle westerners.” The Burlingame Times on 28
July 1937 under the heading “Cotton Crop Here Lure To Dust Bowl Refugees”
declared that “many thousands of southern farmers and refugees from the
midwestern ‘dust bowl’ have invaded the San Joaquin valley.” Again, “southern”
and “midwestern ‘dust bowl’” were not further specified. An article by Sam
Jackson in the Charleston (SC) News and Courier on 8 August
1937 said that officials were surprised that “migration from the western dust
bowl has increased in 1937”—an estimated influx of 100,000 as compared to
84,000 in 1936; “western dust bowl” was not further located. The
Santa Cruz Sentinel on 8 April 1938 announced that “Dust Bowl
Migrants Are Roaming State for Work” and went on to specify that the migrants
had been “cut loose from their farms in Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas by
disaster and mechanization of farming.” The El Paso Herald-Post on
28 July 1938 (“Dust Bowl Migrants Squat On California in Squalor”) quoted
migrants’ explanations for why they had left their homes: they were not able to
make a living on a farm, they staying on a farm till the dust drove them out,
they stayed till the drought ran them out. The reporter continued: “These are
typical answers as the inquiring visitor makes the rounds of California’s
squatter tent and shack towns, inhabited by one-time share croppers, tenant
farmers, independent farmers, casual[tie]s of depression in towns—nomads who
have migrated here from Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Arizona
and elsewhere in search of work and mild winters.”
“Okies”
had been the innocuous nickname of the Norman football team and had been
current in jocular use for themselves among other Oklahomans. The term darkened
as the migrants began to be identified as coming mainly from Oklahoma. On 8
August 1837 the Charleston News and Courier printed this
caption to a grim illustration: “Crowding of families in ‘jungle’ tents, like
this one in ‘Little Oklahoma’ near Tulare, Calif., makes authorities fearful of
the health and morals of dust bowl fugitives.” The accompanying text offered a
definition: “the ‘Okies,’ as the refugees are called (from Oklahoma), occupy
forest service camp grounds,” but the “overflow goes into ‘jungles’ of tents
and shabby shacks which authorities view as breeding places of disease, crime,
immorality and general misery.” On 9 August 1938 the Riverside Daily
Press printed an optimistic article, “Flow of Indigents to State
Slowing Down”: “‘Okies’ from Oklahoma, and ‘Arkies’ from Arkansas are few and
far between,” reported Robert Campbell,” an officer at a state plant quarantine
border station in Blythe. More realistically, in a lecture reported in the
Santa Cruz Sentinel for 25 August 1938, Frank Emery Cox
declared, “Tobacco Road has really come to California and for the first time in
history, this state has rural slums and unlike the tenements of the large
cities, they are populated by ‘poor white trash’ from other states. Approximately
60 per cent of these migrants arrived from six states of the south and
southwest. Oklahoma contributed almost 26 per cent, or one out of every four.”
On 26 October 1938 the New Orleans Times-Picayune showed that
the terms “Arkies” and “Okies” had spread across the country: “Not since the
gold rush of ’49 has there been such a migration to California. So many have
flocked there from Arkansas and Oklahoma they are called Arkies and Okies.” A
19 November 1938 article in the Oakland Tribune, “Bankers
Would Colonize Dust Bowl Migrants on California Farms,” repeated this
terminology while attaching it to a more general geographical area than
Oklahoma and Arkansas: “Middle Westerners--known in California as Oakies [sic]
and Arkies—trailed into the State, their meagre belongings piled high on
ancient automobiles.” The financial theorist Roger W. Babson in the Brownsville
Heraldo of 3 September 1939 used “Okie” to be inclusive—“During the past few
years, thousands of ‘Okies’ (refugees from the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma and
Colorado), the unemployed, the footlo[o]se, and the half-baked from all states
have drifted to Southern California where it is warm and sunny the year round.”
On 25 October 1939 the Charleston (SC) Evening Post, influenced
by John Steinbeck, whose The Grapes of Wrath had been a
sensation starting in April, used “Okies” as an inclusive term for all the
migrants: “the thousands of ‘Okies,’ dust-bowl refugees from Oklahoma,
Missouri, Arkansas and Texas, and thousands of Mexicans from southern
California, sat on their heels while the sun dried out fields dampened by
yesterday’s rain. Many of these are types portrayed by characters in John
Steinbeck’s controversial novel ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’” The refugees from
Oklahoma in fact constituted only [xxxxCheck]% of the 1930s migrants to
California, but even before The Grapes of Wrath was published
the two terms “Okies” and “Arkies” covered most of the migrants except when
“Okies” was the catch-all term for all the migrants. On
21 December 1939, far into the reception of The Grapes of Wrath, the Abilene Reporter-News printed
a new scare headline—“NEGROES COMING!” A Stanford professor had said that “a
great migration of negroes from the cotton lands of the South to California is
only a matter of time. When it comes, he added, the recent migration of white
victims of the dustbowl—the Okies and the Arkies—will seem trifling by
comparison.” (In the 1850s Oregon had tried to exclude all negroes from the
state. Now, as it turned out, negroes came, and sometimes together with whites
on Kaiser trains which brought workers to wartime shipyards—but in
disproportion; the Portland Oregonian on 3 October 1942 said
84 negroes had arrived out of 1160 men. I rode west on a mixed Kaiser-military
train.)
The Daily
News in the Texas panhandle town of Pampa (right in the middle of the
Dust Bowl) on 9 August 1939 printed three associated articles on The
Grapes of Wrath, which had been a sensation since its publication in
April. The overall headline was “The R[oving] R[eporter] Probes
‘Okie’ Rumpus And Presents Two Book Reviews.” The Reporter, fresh from an
exploratory trip to California, issued this call: “All right, Okies, let’s have
your attention for a little while—that’s what they call you Oklahomans in some
places out in California, and they don’t smile particularly when they say it,
and you don’t smile either. You may not even be from Oklahoma. You may be from
Texas, or Arkansas, or even from Kansas, but you’re an Okie to a certain type
of Californian, and he hasn’t got much use for you if you are living from hand
to mouth as some 300,000 Okies are doing right now in the San Joaquin, the
Santa Clara and in other productive valleys.” In the heart of Steinbeck country
the reporter had experienced a striking encounter: “Many of the migrants resent
being called ‘Okies.’ In a Salinas cafe, we met a tall, strong, handsome young
fellow, Tony Dehls, who by the way used to work at the Courthouse cafe in
Pampa. Tony is a native of Arkansas. He said that he had been thrown in jail
seven times as a result of fights with persons who had called him ‘Okie and
didn’t smile.’” American men and many boys still read Owen Wister’s The
Virginian, and many of those who hadn’t read the book knew the 1929 movie
in which Gary Cooper (you can call up a clip in a moment now) says, “You wanta
call me that, SMILE.”
In The
Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck has a man at the Colorado River
explain: "Well, Okie use'ta mean you was from Oklahoma. Now it means
you're a dirty son-of-a-bitch. Okie means you're scum. Don't mean nothing
itself, it's the way they say it." Until Steinbeck peppered the latter
half of his book with “goddamn Okies” no one had characterized the refugees or
migrants to California this way in print, and after The Grapes of Wrath it
would be impossible for anyone to separate out the states from which refugees
poured into California in the 1930s. Into his frequently repeated words
“goddamn Okie” Steinbeck focused all the currents of contempt and hatred
swirling in the 1930s. By making the man declare that the old descriptive
meaning had been replaced, Steinbeck fixed “Okie” as the new inclusive term for
the scum invading California. As much as he sympathized with his Joads,
Steinbeck more than anyone else established “Okies” as a hate term. Born near
Comanche, Oklahoma (and carried right away to the Rio Grande for five years),
my mother born in Guymon, Oklahoma Territory and my father born in Wister,
Indian Territory. (In 1952 when I was an apprentice telegrapher on the AT&SF
Railroad in Red Rock, Oklahoma, oversupplies of tickets to IT and OT
destinations were hanging on big sturdy hooks, still valid.) I am an authority
on this hate term. It persists in American universities with ludicrous malice,
as when a self-promoting writer on Melville regularly identifies me as,
“Hershel Parker, who hails from Oklahoma.” It took an hour’s talk with Ken
Kesey in the 1970s to begin to rid me of the shame I had internalized and start
me toward writing about who the white (or mainly white) Indian Territory
settlers were and how they got there. (I do not treat the later land-rush
arrivals, who had very different histories.)
Even
before it was clear how pernicious the label “Okie” would become, anyone who
knew Oklahoma recognized that Steinbeck had never been there and had no idea of
its geographical or historical features. Any Oklahoman knew that Sallisaw was
not in the dust bowl, although, to be fair to Steinbeck, it did not wholly
escape the dust--which at times covered desks as far away as Washington, D.
C. On 6 July 1933 the Sallisaw local paper, the Democrat-American,
declared that Sallisaw three days earlier had experienced a dust storm “very
much like the sand storms of western Oklahoma. The winds came from the
northeast blowing clouds of sand before it and breaking limbs from trees and
overturning outbuildings.” The Miami (Oklahoma) News Record reported
historic rainfalls in eastern Oklahoma on 21 March 1935, an inch and a half in
Sallisaw. On the same day, a dust storm was so bad that the Ada News reported
that a Kansas boy choked to death, and Guymon citizens could not find their way
in the storm which was “the worst in memory.” The dust was so bad in parts of
eastern Oklahoma “a trace of rain fell, creating a ‘mudfall.’” The Miami News
Record on 27 March 1935 reported a 40 degree drop of temperature in
parts of the state and new waves of silt in central towns (Enid had a “heavy
dust storm”) and eastern towns (in Tulsa visibility was two miles and dust
increasing). At that time there was no dust yet in
Sallisaw. Throughout the 1930s you could, with normal luck, grow
gardens and some crops in Sallisaw.
Steinbeck
knew the California migrant camps from his own investigations and from the
massive documentation provided him by Tom Collins (the Tom of the dedication
of Grapes of Wrath), but his dead flat Sallisaw in Sequoyah County
was a joke to those who knew the Ozarks, the Ouachita’s, the San Bois and other
mountain ranges in eastern Oklahoma. The Oklahoman, as quoted in the
23 October 1939 Pampa News (a town that knew the worst of the
dust bowl), sneered at the idea of film crews coming to Sallisaw: “The Sallisaw
angle is a bit strange, for Steinbeck was ostensibly writing about Okies from
the dust bowl, not from the limestone cliffs and perch pools of Big Lee creek.”
According to the Oakland Tribune on 19 August 1939 (quoting
the Oklahoman), “a screen army” scouting for locations in Oklahoma
for “‘dust bowl’ scenes” had their jobs cut out for them: “Fiction being
fiction, it was not necessary for Steinbeck to visit Oklahoma in order to
compose the year’s fictional masterpiece. His imagination could plant drainage
ditches and rail fences wherever the necessities of the narrative demanded.”
The film crew “had better bring along a fair assignment of ditches and fence
rails when they come to shoot the Oklahoma ‘dust bowl.’” I suspect
that Steinbeck chose Sallisaw so he could have Ma Joad be acquainted with the
mother of Pretty Boy Floyd and Floyd himself, who in 1934 with national
publicity had been shipped in a rough pine box to Sallisaw for burial a few
miles away, in Akins.
Writers
in newspapers and books did not print interviews with refugees about their
ancestry, but with some frequency they pointed out that these were, for the
most part, native white Americans. Journalists needed to emphasize this, once
they began to realize it, because everyone knew that California agri-business
had exploited a succession of darker races and was slow to adapt a crucial
difference about the new influx. Carey McWilliams in Factories in the
Field, which appeared August 1939, four months after The Grapes of
Wrath, traced the way the great landowners in California had successively
exploited “coolie and peon labor”--the Chinese, the Japanese, the Filipinos,
and Mexicans. The new 1930s migrants were mainly white, a change commencing
“about 1933, at the bottom of the depression.” Still, people did not focus on
what was happening until “it was suddenly realized in 1937 that the bulk of the
State’s migratory workers were white Americans and that the foreign racial
groups were no longer a dominant factor.” One of the first and most eloquent
writers on the topic was Robert Hardie. On 14 November 1937 the Fresno Bee
The Republican quoted Hardie, the director of a federal camp for
migratory leaders in the Wasco-Shafter district, as praising the “harvest
workers of Kern County for being “in the main a healthy, industrious lot, good
natured and gregarious, fond of music and dancing, highly appreciative of the
simple pleasures their lives afford and possessed of a simple faith in the
Deity.” “Most Are Natives,” says a subhead: “They are 98 per cent native white
American people who mostly hail from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Arizona.”
Hardie had gone farther: “They are of good pioneer stock, descendants of the
Scotch, Irish and English settlers who followed such men as Daniel Boone
through the Cumberland Gap and settled the hill country of Kentucky and
Tennessee and later the Cherokee territory.” He continued: “it is only by the
barest economic accident that they go hungry and unemployed.”
What
Hardie said of the settlers who had gone with or followed Daniel Boone west did
not apply to the Sooners and Boomers who had arrived in northern Oklahoma in
the late 19th century land rushes. Other than not realizing
that “Irish” really meant “Scotch,” what he said applied to the children and
grandchildren of the whites (often part Indian) who had come earlier into the
Choctaw Nation and the Cherokee Nation. Even Steinbeck, who had not done
rudimentary research on the terrain of Oklahoma, had some sense of the
background of a typical eastern Oklahoma family like the Joads. He
dropped in names of famous Kentucky-West Virginia feuding families, “ol
Turnbull” saying he had Hatfield blood and threatening to shoot Tom Joad when
he got out of prison, and Grampa Joad sending word to Turnbull, “‘Don’t mess
around with no Joad. Maybe I got McCoy blood for all I know.’” One of the
migrants tells a generic Indian-fighting story (“I was a recruit against
Geronimo”). At one point the generalized voice of a representative migrant (not
one of the Joads) says “We ain’t foreign. Seven generations back Americans, and
beyond that Irish, Scotch, English, German. One of our folks in the Revolution,
an’ they was lots of our folks in the Civil War—both sides. Americans.” Not
until much later is there a specific detail about the ancestry of the Joad
family. In her relief at being in a camp where she can have a bath, Ma praises
God that “we come home to our own people.” She continues: “We’re Joads. We
don’t look up to nobody. Grampa’s grampa, he fit in the Revolution.” Steinbeck
had learned or guessed from the labor camps that some Okies knew something
about their own history--“Seven generations back Americans.” In historical
fact, however, any such family would have had far more than one ancestor and
other kinsmen in the Revolution.
Long
before Steinbeck became interested in the plight of the migrant workers in
California, the Bavarian immigrant Oscar Ameringer, soon after Oklahoma
statehood, had seen that “comparison could not be thought of,” because the
living standard of the local farmers “was so far below that of the sweatshop
workers of the New York east side before the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and
International Ladies’ Garment Workers Unions had mopped up that human
cesspool.” Ameringer went on with the best description that had been made of
the ancestry the people of eastern Oklahoma, the part which had been “almost
exclusively populated by people from the Old South”:
They
were Americans almost to a man. Their forefathers had been starved, driven,
shipped and sold over here long before and shortly after the Revolution. They
were Scotch, Irish, Scotch-Irish and English with only a few exceptions. They
were more American than the population of any present-day New England town.
They were Washington’s ragged, starving, shivering army at Valley Forge, pushed
ever westward by beneficiaries of the Revolution. Pushed out of Tidewater
Virginia, and out of the fertile Piedmont, and the river valleys of the Central
Atlantic states, into the hills and mountains of the South Central States. They
had followed on the heels of the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and
Seminoles, like the stragglers of routed armies. Always hoping that somewhere
in their America there would be a piece of dirt for them.
The
“Irish” were in fact mainly Scotch, and he ought to have added the
Pennsylvanian Dutch (Deutsch), the Germans who went down the Great Wagon Road
in the three decades before the Revolution. Nor did Ameringer point out that
many of the 1930s Oklahomans had not merely followed on the heels of Indians
but were blood-kin to many Indians whose people had been removed from the Old
South.
Ameringer
continued with his vision of the southern whites who could not legally buy the
land but who had settled “in the hills of the Indian Territory, tenants of
white land hogs, Indians, squaw men and Afro-American freedmen.” He pointed to
“the interesting spectacle of white, native, Protestant Americans working as
the land slaves, tenants and share croppers of the aboriginal Indian.” As the
White Father in Washington acted his part with his promises, “squaw men,
usurers, land sharks, and Eastern insurance companies had come into possession”
of the Indians’ inheritance, which was “to have been his ‘as long as water
flows.’” The “position of the tenants and share croppers hit rock-bottom. So at
last they pulled out onto Highway Sixty-Six on their final journey to
Gethsemane.” He summed up: “burned out and tractored out, they pulled up stakes
for the last time until they landed in ramshackle trucks and tin lizzies in
California, as ragged, hungry and shivering as their ancestors at Valley
Forge.” If You Don’t Weaken was all but completed by 1939
(Carl Sandburg’s Foreword was dated March 1940), but Ameringer was able to
interpolate two references to The Grapes of Wrath. His book was published
before the surviving Okies in California were helped by the xxx and the xxx and
rescued by War Work.
Many
of the dispersed Okies, I know from my own experience, did not have the
knowledge of their own history which Ameringer did, or even the limited
knowledge that Steinbeck gave the Joads. Three removes are as good
as a fire, Franklin said. I realized, eventually, that successive
migrations were a big part in reducing the number and detail of stories any
family knew. Many stories may have accompanied the first settlers from across
the ocean. Families who arrived in Pennsylvania could leave some members there
while part of the family united with connections for the trek down the Great
Wagon Road to North Carolina, and hold together there during the
Revolution. Some of the Scotch came together or got in touch with
family once they were here, and in my family kept together by marrying cousins.
After the Revolution all families dispersed still faster. After 1800 sons from
the Carolinas angling up across Tennessee on the Nashville-Saline Trail to
pioneer on the Mississippi banks of Illinois. Sons in every generation headed
west into Tennessee or Mississippi, or even Alabama, even before that area was
opened for white settlement after the War of 1812. Dispersal was
cause enough for loss of connections, given the difficulties of traveling and
communicating, but family lives and family history were obliterated for many by
the catastrophe of the Civil War. Illiterate people seldom found
someone to write home for them, even if they were sure where home was. Ground
down since the Civil War, many people simply did not have time for happy
storytelling. It was no wonder that many of the Okies in what had been the
Choctaw Nation and the Cherokee Nation in eastern Indian Territory, especially,
had become a people without even as much family memory as Steinbeck gave the
Joads.
There
were exceptions. James Webb in Born Fighting recognizes the
forces that crushed family member, but he was lucky enough, despite all
hardships, to witness and cherish the times on porches and firesides when
kinfolk gathered and told stories:
I
thirsted to hear these kin-people talk. I could sit entranced through magic
hours in the stark kitchens and quiet, dusky living rooms of those who were
willing to reach back like those ancient tribal elders and help me understand
that my life is in some sense a continuum that began before I was born, and
will carry me with it long after I am gone. Their revelations came in dribbles,
sometimes coaxed and at others dropped casually into a conversation like a sly
but knowing confession. The tough, enduring men and women who went through this
cauldron did not speak openly or even willingly with each other about the bad
times when I was growing up. It seems an unspoken axiom that people who have
really had it hard are the last ones to sit around and reminisce about how hard
they really had it. In fact, I know there are some who will not be happy that
I’ve touched on those days here, however lightly. And I have lightly trod, for
they did indeed live hard.
Webb
was part of “the near-biblical storytelling tradition of the culture of the
Scots who came from Ireland.” In that tradition, the “personal becomes history,
and history becomes personal,” he said.
Webb,
almost miraculously, saw the “well-worn pages of family Bibles, some of those
books carried from Ulster into the wilderness and treasured through the
centuries, births and marriages and deaths entered carefully as the book itself
was passed down over the generations into the present day.” We know
from Revolutionary pension applications that family Bibles with their records
of marriages and births were often destroyed by fires (more common than now)
or, as the family dispersed, left in the possession of the oldest son or at
least a member of the family who could read and write. Webb saw “faded letters
sent from faraway relatives recalling places and events, pooling information
that might reconstruct a family’s journey.” The great historian has his
maternal grandmother, a literate woman, when he was twelve “finally wrote out
an amazingly accurate eleven-page summary of her family’s movement from
Virginia through Tennessee, then down the Mississippi and finally into Arkansas,
replete with the dates of births and deaths, marriages, and military
enlistments.” She “had been carrying all of this in her head, passed down from
mother to daughter through each generation in singsong verses on the narrow
front porch of some latest cabin as the hot summer sun gave way to a sultry,
bug-filled evening, or huddled next to the fireplace before there ever was such
a thing as radio to fill the boredom of a winter night.” Webb’s father once
sent him a “History of the House of Ochiltree” published by a local printer in
a small Kansas town, tracing some of the family: “The book was never intended
to be great literature, but like so many similar works of family genealogy, it
was a means of capturing vital family information before it became lost in the
frenzy of America’s obsession with the future rather than the past.” For all
his sense of how precarious family history was, Webb was a lucky man.
Many
of the Okies, particularly those who had been impoverished ever since the Civil
War and who were suffering more than ever in the Depression, had no leisure,
ever, to hear stories or tell stories. People worked too hard during the
daylight hours and had no strength for sitting telling stories. My mother had
no idea that her grandfather, John Andrew Jackson Costner, had been a
Confederate soldier. She had no idea when the Costners had arrived on this
continent and whether it was to the colonies or the United States. One
great-aunt told me that her grandmother was a “Chockie” (Choctaw) who smoked a
clay pipe and pinched children. My mother knew that her Mississippi grandfather
Bell liked to say, inexplicably, that he was Scotch-Irish and Damn Yankee. My
father knew that his grandfather Parker had run deadfalls in the Mississippi
snow, carrying a heated rock in a two sack and throwing it down to warm his
feet on while he checked the trap. There were comments on the Dust Bowl, when
they were in the very worst places, but no one told stories.
Starting
in 2002, knowing only those tiny anecdotes, I have compiled in chronological
order, starting in the 1600s, vivid, detailed glimpses of some of my American
ancestors who I had thought would have left almost no written
record. As of early 2021, I have a massive file called ORNERY
PEOPLE (a title now too defensive to keep) and some 10,000
documents in a file called GLIMPSES--page or so looks at kinfolks at
revealing--indeed, fascinating--moments in their lives and (often) of American
history, usually in some of their own words (even from the 1600s and 1700s). I
have found these in a great array of sources such as history books; exploration
books; wills; land transfers; county records; early military records (as early as the French and Indian War and Lord Dunmore’s War); then many dozens of
Revolutionary pension applications from aged patriots; military records for all
later wars; other governmental records; a few family letters in county
libraries and many in college or university collections; a Mexican captivity
book written by a Texas Bell cousin; dozens of affidavits from ancestors and other kinfolks in the
archives of the Bureau of Indian Affairs; hundreds of censuses; many hundreds,
perhaps 2,000 or 3,000, of articles from newspapers in four centuries, starting
before the Revolution; WPA interviews; hundreds of Fold3 items; and hundreds of
Find-A-Grave photographs of tombstones and other information, even from Ancestry.com, where everything has to be verified, or other sites where you have to remember “garbage in, garbage out.” This is a unique genealogical and
historical project because I bring to it all I have learned about persistent and skeptical historical
research in a scholarly career spanning more than half a century. The idea
behind the study is that any Depression Okie, anyone whose family had been in
eastern Oklahoma since the mid-19th century, can now (like neighbors in the late 1940s, such as the Heflins and the Kuykendals) do something
comparable. With the Internet anyone can retrieve lost family stories and
establish new historical memories in the context of successive episodes of
American history. I and others like me can understand just who the Joads would
have been, the history they would have had, whether they knew it or not.
Ameringer
concluded his look at the ancestry of Okies with this paean: “I wish someone
would look up the names on the roster of Washington’s army at Valley Forge and
trace the bloody footprints of their descendants across the North American
continent until they were washed up and washed out on the shore of the Pacific.
What an all-American Odyssey it would make! And what a great history of the
Rise and Fall of American Civilization.” Writing with intimate knowledge of how
people were still suffering from the Great Depression, Ameringer saw the
American experiment as a rise and fall. During the most corrupt Presidency in
American history, it is hard to refute Ameringer. Nevertheless, there is
personal triumph in discovering your family’s place in American history, in
retrieving, piece by piece, your family history in relation to the great sweep
of the history of the South. Scratch the ancestral records of any mainly white
Indian Territory Okie and you recapitulate stories of colonization in the
mid-Atlantic and the South and the thrusts westward. In retrieving my own
representative family history, I contribute to what Ameringer wanted to see, an
All-American Odyssey.
[In 2020 I decided I had
to focus more closely, at least at first. Now in early 2021 I am working only
on racial interactions, starting in the 1600s-- RACIAL ENCOUNTERS.]
