copyright Hershel Parker 26 June 2022
Who the Okies Really Were
Long
before Grapes of Wrath made “Okie” pernicious,
anyone who knew Oklahoma recognized that Steinbeck had never been there and had
no idea of its geographical or historical features. Sallisaw was not in the
dust bowl. True, 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 Grapes of Wrath dedication), 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 to film scenes for Grapes
of Wrath: “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.’” Locals had plenty to be outraged about, and
ignorance of the setting was an obvious and safe target. Steinbeck may have seized
on “Sallisaw” as a name ludicrously quaint (had he heard the humorous Okie
chant of town names, “Sallisaw Aline Waggoner Bowlegs”?), but he may have
wanted Ma Joad to know 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.
Although
Steinbeck, everyone recognized, knew nothing about the geography of Oklahoma, he
knew a little about how Oklahoma had been settled by whites and by eastern
Indians. He understand from his friends and newspapers that white ancestors of many
of the 1930s eastern Okies had been on this continent a long time. During the
1930s writers in newspapers and books did not print interviews with refugees
about their ancestry, but they pointed out that these were, for the most part,
native white Americans. Journalists needed to emphasize this, for they knew
that California agri-business had exploited a succession of darker races and
was slow to adapt to 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.”
Half
a century later Robert Hardie, who had been a “disciple” of Tom Collins at the
Weedpatch Camp, said that he had considered Steinbeck “an affable,
down-to-earth guy” who “blended in pretty well” with the migrants (Rockford
Illinois Register Star, 7 December
1986). On 14 November 1937 the Fresno Bee Republican quoted
Hardie, by then 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 Daniel Boone or followed him and
others west did not apply to the Sooners and Boomers who had arrived in
northern Oklahoma in the late 19th century land rushes. Hardie
also did not realize that the “Irish” were mainly Scots from northern Ireland (no
one organized shiploads of Irish Catholics to Pennsylvania, Virginia, or South
Carolina), but what Hardie said applied well to the children and grandchildren of
the whites (often part Indian) who had come earlier, mainly into the Choctaw
Nation and the Cherokee Nation. Steinbeck had learned or guessed from the labor
camps that some Okies knew a little about their own history.
Long
before Steinbeck became interested in the migrant workers in California, the
Bavarian immigrant Oscar Ameringer, soon after Oklahoma statehood 16 November
1907), had seen that “comparison could not be thought of” between eastern
Oklahoma farmers and the factory workers in New York, 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.”
Ameringer
continued with his vision of the southern whites at the period when they could
not legally buy land from Indians 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 new
labor laws and then rescued by war work, notably in the Kaiser shipyards.
Ameringer
was eloquent and for the most part accurate. He was right that some ancestors of
these Okies had been brought over as indentured servants and right about their
arrival “long before the Revolution,” but in fact comparatively few came
“shortly after the Revolution.” Ameringer did not realize that the “Irish” who
came (until the mid-19th century) were in fact mainly Scots, first
exported by James I to help control the natives, the way colonial officials in
Charleston in 1773 sent the last boatloads of Protestant Scots (among them my
Copelands) far inland where they could be a buffer against the Cherokees--defend
themselves and their free plats of land if they could, and incidentally protect
distant Charles-Town. A great-aunt told me accurately that her grandmother was
a “Chockie” (Choctaw) who smoked a clay pipe and pinched children, but she was
sure her red-headed white father, John Rogers, was a “full blooded Irishman.”
No, he was Scottish and German, censuses and DNA shows. If ancestors sailed
here from Ireland, descendants assumed they were Irish. (In 1990 I learned that
when Rogers bowed his head and muttered before eating he was saying the Lord’s
Prayer in Choctaw.)
Ameringer
ought to have added the Germans, descendants of those Pennsylvania Dutch
(Deutsch) who went down the Great Wagon Road in the several decades before the
Revolution. Ameringer also failed to point out that many of the 1930s
Oklahomans had not merely followed on the heels of Indians but were blood-kin
to Indians whose people had been progressively pushed out of the Old South. Nor
did Ameringer mention in his sweeping dramatic account the Blacks who had been
brought to Virginia, South Carolina, and other colonies as slaves, the
ancestors of Blacks who had survived two centuries of bondage in the South
before a small percentage of them were brought to the Choctaw Nation as slaves
of Indians or occasionally free people, well before some Blacks in what became
Oklahoma dared, around 1900, to hope the Indian Territory and Oklahoma
Territory could be a separate Black Territory.
Ameringer
gave a strong description of the push downward on the Great Wagon Road then
“ever westward” (not counting those who had arrived in the south, mainly Charleston)
but he did not focus on what was lost in human memory by the intermittent
pushing. Stories surely accompanied
the first settlers from across the ocean, but they were not always passed on. (Only
now do I know that the father of one German ancestor had been--on the basis of
a woman’s gossip--beheaded and burned for bestiality with a horse.) “Three
removes is as bad as a fire,” Franklin said. One ocean crossing was as good as
a fire. Only a few colonists, not my kinfolks but wealthier Virginians, made
trips back to England (and it would have been England, rarely Scotland,
Ireland, or Wales) or tried to keep in touch by letters. Successive migrations
in the colonies progressively reduced the number and detail of older stories
any family knew.
In
Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck
lets a representative migrant (not one of the Joads) say, “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.” Ma Joad declares “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
stories about their own history. He was right to depict the other migrants and
the Joads as not knowing any detail about their own ancestry, but he was also
ill-informed. In historical fact, seven or six “generations back” (or four or
five) would have seen many not “one” ancestor but several in the Revolution (most
often against the British), and many more ancestors of Okies would have fought
and died in the Civil War, although more from the South than the North, not
equally from “both sides.” That war ought to have been living memory in the
1930s, but often was not. My mother did not know that her grandfather, John
Andrew Jackson Costner, had been a Confederate soldier, and that many Costners and
many cousins with other last names had been killed. No one in my family knew
that Confederate thugs in Arkansas had hanged the pro-Union father of the Great
Grandfather Rogers whom I saw on his deathbed early in 1946.
From
the early 1700s circumstances propelled people from home. Isolated from the
past, families tried ways of keeping together for their own time. They married
cousins, as Adamses and Ewarts and others did, I learned, down to my mother’s
generation, when her sister Una Costner married first cousin John Costner. Brothers
and sisters married sisters and brothers. The Tuckers and part Choctaw Glenns
spectacularly demonstrated how many brothers and sisters could marry sisters
and brothers. Double cousins and closer were not uncommon--look at the family
of my distant cousin Jerry Lee Lewis. Copeland men married Chapman wives.
Sometimes father and son married widowed mother and daughter: a Coker father
and son did. Many Southerners were related in two or even several different
ways, the way I am at least doubly kin to Sparks and Prewitt boys who were
slaughtered in the massacre of Unionists at Limestone Cove, or the way I am kin
to several Mississippi families through both a Bell and a Costner but not through
my direct Bell and Costner ancestors. As Internet cousin Lois Gore says, a
Southerner is either kin or connected.
But inevitably families separated. Families who arrived in Pennsylvania and moved
south would leave some members there, seldom or never seen again by those of
the family that made the trek down the Great Wagon Road to North Carolina, and
destined to fight on opposite sides in the Civil War. The one Dellinger uncle
(I learned) who made annual overland trips back to Philadelphia until the
Revolution was a grocer needing new supplies. (He lured his second wife down
from Pennsylvania on the promise of unlimited coffee, and indulgence in that
luxury, the North Carolina neighbors were sure, hastened her death.) Most
Germans held together in North Carolina during and just after the Revolution,
although some pushed into South Carolina and Georgia. Illiterate
people seldom found someone to write home for them and even literate people
could not always be sure where home was, any more, and could not find a
traveler to do them the “favor” of delivering a letter.
After the Revolution all families
dispersed still faster. The patriarchs had less land than the earlier generations.
There were simply too many children to leave plantations to all of them, as
some had done. For some soldiers, even mere militia men, not Continentals,
there was bounty land--most of it recently Indian land, so still risky, as
western South Carolina had been with land grants just before the Revolution. Virginians
and Carolinians (North and South), went into Georgia then into what became
Tennessee. Sons and then whole families
in every generation headed west, Tennessee first (while it was still part of
North Carolina), then Mississippi, or even Alabama, before that area was opened
for white settlement soon after the War of 1812.
Many Carolinians--Pruitts, Moores,
Tindals, Pyles--just after 1800 went up the Saline Trace and other trails to become early
white pioneers in Illinois on the banks of the Mississippi, then, again as
first settlers, went east into Indiana. We don’t think of this, but Southerners
settled much of Illinois and Indiana. Eight of my Uncle Daniel Moore’s children
from the Globe in Burke County, North Carolina, went West, to Tennessee,
Arkansas, Indiana, and Illinois. Four of his brother Jesse’s daughters left the
Globe for Indiana, two for Kentucky, and two remained in North Carolina. Many
of my folks (Sparks, Sims, McGehee, Hill) reached Texas while it was still
Mexican and many more arrived while it was a republic (one was a Bell who published
his true captivity narrative about the Mier Expedition). Many had gone on to
western Mississippi and Arkansas even before the Cherokees, Choctaws and
Chickasaws were pushed on into what was newly called Indian Territory.
You
realize how very separated Southern families became
by reading on the Internet, for free, twenty-some thousands of painstakingly
transcribed applications for pensions under the 1832 law--pensions for those
who had been in militias in the Revolution, not in the already-pensioned elite,
the Continental army. Will Graves and Leon Harris, volunteers with previous and
ongoing careers, are the heroes of this 21st century enterprise, Internet
philanthropists, not only transcribing pensions but also making them almost
infinitely searchable. Soon you could verify their transcriptions yourself,
more arduously, by scrutinizing photographs on another site, Fold3. Subtract a year, 1775 through 1783 from 1832 or
1833 and you see that many of the applicants had been boys when they fought,
and the older ones were exceptionally hearty to survive bureaucratic delays in
approving valid applications. (There were aged applicants, such as my
Grandfather Knox, who applied at 91 and enjoyed his pension for a year.)
These transcriptions are a treasure of
information about dispersal. You see old men applying from states where they
had not lived before the Revolution, and learn that often they had lived successively
in more than one state besides the present one. (Historians delight in these
men who had not seen their fellows for half a century for you know they did not
collude in ranking their officers as brave or cowardly!) While they remembered
the war, many of them were uncertain where any brothers and sisters might be
(if still alive) and who among them might have the family Bible which might
have a record of their birth. Many Bibles, you learn, had not survived the very
common house fires. Many of the applicants did not know exactly how old they
were, neither birthday or birth year.
Above all, for me, the pension
applications and supporting affidavits in recounting military service very
often contain incidental clues, often the only clues to family connections and
more stories, as well as lost connections. Later, affidavits
before the Dawes Commission in
Indian Territory late in the 1800s also demonstrate how far families can be
estranged. Two daughters of the same mother, Elizabeth Glenn, the children of
two Tucker brothers, Wyatt and Robert) did not know about each other. Amanda
knew that her mother had been married to Wyatt and that he had died or gone
off. Frances did not know that Elizabeth had married again and had children
with Robert. Frances’s daughter Frances McCall got the names wrong and thought
she was descended from Robert and did not mention Wyatt. Frances Tucker,
daughter of Wyatt, may not have known the
existence of Amanda (though she used the name for a child) since
Elizabeth had left Wyatt’s children with the half-Choctaw Abigail Rogers Glenn
in Mississippi.
Dispersal was cause enough for loss of family stories, given the
difficulties of traveling and communicating, but in the South family lives and
family stories alike were obliterated by the catastrophe of the Civil War which
killed so many and left survivors impoverished. You could all but obliterate the
history of the South, including family history, Generals Grant and Sherman
understood. They did not have to kill everyone. All they had to do was torch
every newspaper office in every town they conquered. Paper was not all that
vanished, of course. Grant’s army trudged back and forth around Itawamba
County, Mississippi (for example), so at war’s end the farms were devastated
and fully half the men in my Fulton Township were dead or simply gone from
records, including my Great Great Grandfather Parker and his second wife. Only
DNA from descendants of an older Texan half-brother allows us to identify a boy
born in 1858 as my Parker great grandfather, and learn an astonishing story
about his father’s first courtship, in Alabama.
There were exceptions, families who retained some
of their stories. James Webb in Born Fighting recognizes the forces
that crushed family memory but he got to “witness and cherish the times on
porches and firesides when kinfolk gathered and told stories.” As he elaborated:
“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.” Webb saw
“faded letters sent from faraway relatives recalling places and events, pooling
information that might reconstruct a family’s journey.” He says 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 an extraordinarily
lucky man. I admired Webb profoundly because of his love of family
stories--to the point of sending him the $100 in 2006 (the first time I had
sent money to a politician out of state). That check, I was convinced, proved
just enough to propel him into the Senate from Virginia. But I envied him even
more than I admired him: I longed to know my own family stories. My parents had
survived all the worst of the Dust Bowl in the worst of all places, the
Panhandle of Oklahoma and the Panhandle of Texas (as Timothy Egan tells in The Worst Hard Time), yet they almost
never spoke of it. Mother only spoke of stuffing rags under doors and around
the window. They knew few family stories and told fewer.
My
mother had no idea when the Costners had arrived on this continent and whether
it was to the colonies or the United States. She knew that her Mississippi
grandfather Frank Bell liked to say, inexplicably, that he was “Scotch-Irish
and Damn Yankee.” He was Scotch-Irish, yes, descended from Scots who had been
exiled to Ireland, but he probably never stepped outside of Mississippi, and
had no Yankee ancestors, damned or sainted. He was ornery, I think, jealous of
his older brother, James Alexander Bell, who had survived the Yankee death camp
of Rock Island and for the rest of his life (I know from Mississippi cousins
met on the Internet) was unable to drive off anywhere in his wagon without a
pocketful of dried fruit, just in case. (Many Mississippians had fruit trees
from seeds their ancestors had brought from the Carolinas and other old
states.) My father knew that his grandfather Parker at five or six years old
had run barefoot in the northeast Mississippi snow checking his deadfalls,
carrying a heated rock in a tow sack and throwing it down to warm his feet
while he checked a trap for any small animal, and then ran on to others until
the rock was cold before hurrying back inside through the snow for another
heated rock. But was this a story about a precocious hunter? The answer was not
part of this generic “you think you have it hard” story. Born in 1858 (the 1860
Census shows), the boy may have been sustaining life for himself and others,
which others we don’t know. There was a baby girl born after him who might have
been alive during some of the war, and perhaps his mother and others, maybe
even his father, all vanished by 1870.
How
was I to learn stories? Shipping records from Ellis Island? Oh, no! My last, belated,
white ancestors (the Copelands, I now know) arrived in 1772 but were kept
aboard ship at “Charles-Town” until 1773. My parents, Martha Costner and Lloyd
Parker, were born in territories, not in any state, my mother in Oklahoma
Territory, my father in Indian Territory (in August 1907, months before
statehood). Only forty-five years after statehood, in 1952, I was an apprentice
telegrapher on the AT&SF in Red Rock, Oklahoma, where handsome stiff long
tickets to towns in IT and OT hung on brass hooks awaiting enough travelers to
buy them before new ones could be printed. A few tickets had survived their
destinations, outlasting depots or even little towns. Are other Americans alive
whose parents were born in these two territories? More likely, there could be
someone with one parent born in New Mexico and another in Arizona before
statehood in 1912.
I
may not be unique in parents born in different territories, but I am a Depression
Okie (born near Comanche at the end of 1935 and taken almost at once to
Escobas, Texas, just north of the Rio Grande), and my search for lost family
and their stories could be paralleled by many others with families from the Choctaw
Nation. Many of us from what became Oklahoma started with near-total ignorance
of ancestry. Except for Parker, Costner, Bell, Glenn, and Rogers (or Rodgers),
the names I mention through this introduction are all names of people I met in
the 21st century--met on the Internet, the poor genealogist’s
make-do equivalent of Jim Webb’s remarkable bounty of family records.
Many
of the eastern 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. Okies in 1920s and
1930s worked too hard during the daylight hours to have the strength
for indulging in happy storytelling, even if their memories had been well
stocked and sharp. They had no strength for sitting telling stories, in the
dark or by the light of a fireplace or a lamp, if they could afford coal-oil.
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 the scraps of family memory Steinbeck gave the Joads.
In stolen intervals from
work on Herman Melville starting early in this century, I began looking on the
Internet, hoping to find some mention of Americans who, I was afraid, might
have left no written records at all. I was wrong. There were hundreds, thousands
of documents about ancestors and other people kin to me, and in some were
stories, sometimes compiling, vivid, detailed stories, enough to please cnd
excite me for two decades. All those years I saved what I was working on as Ornery People, in tribute to some of the
characters I had come to know.
From 1960 on, deprived of my own
stories, I had discovered dozens, even hundreds of new stories
about Herman Melville which I vowed not to let go unrecorded--even the
name of a lost book he had written, The Isle
of the Cross. I wrote two volumes, Herman Melville: A
Biography (published in 1996 and 2002), each more than 900 pages long,
and a later 600-page book, Melville Biography (2012). In stolen intervals from work on Herman Melville starting
in late 2002, I began looking on the Internet, hoping to find some mention of
Americans who, I had thought, might have left no written records at all. I was
wrong. I began finding hundreds, even thousands of documents about ancestors
and other people kin to me, and in some were stories, sometimes compiling,
vivid, detailed stories, enough to incite me for two decades. For two decades I
saved what I was accumulating on as Ornery People, in tribute to
some of the characters I had come to know.
I
was ready to leave work on Melville after the 2019 Library of America volume on
Melville’s poetry, for by then I was a very old man. In mid-April 2020, masked,
I was coolly told by masked pre-eminent ocular oncologist at a great western
university that my approaching blindness was from rapidly advancing lymphoma.
They could remove the eye, but that would not stop the cancer. We had
made holograph wills before driving up for what proved to be a
misdiagnosis for another serious disease which had indeed led to blindness and
death, but was treatable, if caught in time. Home, we made new regular wills,
with lawyers, but I urgently wanted to live to preserve and publicize some of
what I had learned about my family and its place in American history. Then
within weeks, the murder of Floyd George on 25 May forced me into radically
sharpening my survey of all I had discovered in the 2000s. Despite subsequent
(and sometimes consequent) illnesses, I have completed An Okie’s
Racial Reckonings.
Now,
if An Okie’s Racial Reckonings does
not find an established publisher, I can post the chapters on my blog, fragmentsfromawritingdesk, as I have already
begun to do. Now as I revise this book I am sending flash drives with
up to ten thousand items to descendants of my parents, hints enough to inform
and to inspire more research into who the Okies really were. I do not have to
live long enough to master self-publishing in book form, although I am ornery
enough to want to try.
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