"An Okie's Racial Reckonings" is finished and I am revising it. The first chapter is on how we became known as "Goddamn Okies."

 This is a trial end of the second chapter on who the Okies really were. This follows a tribute to Jim Webb's stories of his family stories. (He knew infinitely more family stories than I did.)

        Many of the eastern Okies, particularly those who had been impoverished ever since the Civil War, had no leisure, ever, to hear stories or tell stories. In the Depression many Okies worked so hard during the daylight hours that 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.

          Deprived of my own stories, for decades I discovered dozens, even hundreds of new stories about Herman Melville which I vowed not to let go unrecorded.  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 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 the diagnosis. This proved to be a misdiagnosis for another serious disease which had indeed led to blindness and death, but was treatable, if caught in time. 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 at 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. I do not have to live long enough to master self-publishing, although I am ornery enough to want to try. 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.