"Goddamn Okie"--and Professor Chowderhead's habitual slurring--from a piece I wrote several years ago.

          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 remembered 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 Steinbeck 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 (then being taken to the Rio Grande for five years), from a mother born in Oklahoma Territory and a father born in Indian Territory, I am an authority on this hate term. It persists in the academy with ludicrous malice, as when at meetings a self-promoting writer on Melville regularly signaled my approach with, “It's Hershel Parker, who hails from Oklahoma.” It took an hour’s talk with Ken Kesey in the 1970s to rid me of the shame I had internalized and start me toward writing what I am calling ORNERY PEOPLE. Even that term may be changed, as too in-your-face defensive. Some of us change.