When the greatest West Coast ocular oncologists in April 2020 were certain my near-blindness was because I had Lymphoma (and a particularly rapidly advancing case, since by chance I had a photograph of the right eye from January) we made our wills, of course. We made holograph wills before going up for the high and mighty ocular oncologists than made more formal wills on our return, though in California the holograph wills were valid. I had some unfinished Melville work, but no one was in a rush to see it. I had an almost unbelievable mass of information on my American ancestors--items located since 2002 at intervals stolen from work on Melville. I had been calling the file ORNERY PEOPLE and it was about who the Eastern Indian Territory Okies were and how they had gotten there in the 1800s. And I had a many-thousand item file of GLIMPSES, chronological. In 2020 the news helped me focus on a portion of the great files. On 18 May I began searching GLIMPSES for "Negro." By the time George Floyd was murdered on 25 May I was also searching "Indians." By this time I was on extremely high dosage of an anti-fungal drug which was stopping the destruction of the eye (a millimeter from the macula, leaving big scarring) then on blood thinners after a DVT, and the illness was a horrible one--not Lymphoma but Valley Fever. I was extraordinarily weak for many months and had to give up the regular 2 miles a day on the beach for those months. The oculists continued to take hundreds of pictures and just could not believe that I did not have cancer but something else.
In all of this I decided that I had to write a book about racial encounters but I was too sick to do more than continue to separate out documents for that new book. In 2021, and not at once, I began to move. By the end of April 2021 I was walking 2 miles again, as I have continued to do. I began writing what became AN OKIE'S RACIAL RECKONINGS and finished a clean draft in May 2022 and started revising it.
But could I publish it? Could I at 86 or 87 subject myself to contemptuous committees who would delay months then pass their report over to another committee? Oh for the time when the director of Northwestern University Press saw me at a party in Los Angeles and asked what I was doing, after going to Delaware, and when I told him, in some detail, said he wanted it, so I wrote it in 1983 and he published it in 1984.
So, I have been putting chapters in my blog, fragmentsfromawritingdesk. What the hell? At least I have lived to finish an extraordinarily complicated book. I do not want to die with some of it unseen, even though some of it will outrage some people. What I learned about the massacre of kinfolks at Mountain Meadows in 1857 had to be told, in 2 chapters. In the coming days I will post more chapters.
If a regular publisher comes along and is hot to publish this as a book, fine. And if I live and learn one more technical challenge, I could self-publish.
Here is the table of contents.
In the Washington Post 22 November
2021 Ken Burns says: "Being an American means reckoning with a history
fraught with violence and injustice. Ignoring that reality in favor of
mythology is not only wrong but also dangerous. The dark chapters of American
history have just as much to teach us, if not more, than the glorious ones, and
often the two are intertwined.”
Table of Contents of "An
Okie's Racial Reckonings"
What I have been doing in 2021 and 2022 is
just what Burns says, reckoning with American history. This may be the first book in which an
ordinary Southerner investigates his ancestry on this continent and then
focuses on his kinfolks and race. All these chapters are about kinfolks of mine
in the colonies or in the United States. Every chapter needs revision, but all
the chapters are complete as of April 2022.
AN OKIE’S RACIAL RECKONINGS
#01 “GODDAMN OKIES”--How Grapes of Wrath defined Oklahomans
#02 WHO THE OKIES WERE--(Eastern Oklahomans,
white, red, and black, who had been there in Choctaw and Cherokee Territories)
#03 FAMILY STORIES--BEFORE I SAW WHAT I
HAD TO write was A RACE BOOK--good happy oblivious stories
#04 COUSINS AT WAR ON THE CHEROKEES --What
the Carolinians were doing after the first battle in 1776 instead of going off
to fight the British
#05 JEFFERSON, COCKE, SIMS (The burning
of the Sims Settlement 2 times. Jefferson as one of the cousins, an
inconsistent one)
#06 RACIAL OBLIVIOUSNESS AT TRAP HILL (Cousin
who married the Siamese Twins in NC--and 2 NC cousins who held Union meetings
in 1863)
#07 Brigham
Young’s Utah: Polygamy, Murders, and Massacres, always Blaming the Indians (Many
of my family were murdered)
#08 Slaughtering for Parley, Brigham, and Jesus, But Saving Some
Babies for Ransom
#09 JESSE
SPARKS--Falsely ACCUSED OF ATROCITY TO
BLACKS, he LIVED TO BEFRIEND
INDIANS AND BLACKS--NEVER KNOWING OF THE ACCUSATION. HE AND MILTON (SEE #10) ARE COUSINS OF MINE
BUT NOT OF EACH OTHER
#10 MILTON
SIMS--“SENTENCED TO BE HANGED” --THE GREATEST ADVENTURER; AFTER THIS DETAILED
HISTORY of him as federal prisoner. He lived TO KISS THE GLOVE OF THE EMPRESS
CARLOTA.
#11 FLETCHER HILL & FRATERNITY--1864 escape
from Rebel Prison and journey to Union lines with help from Blacks and Red
Stringers, then a generous afterlife
#12 CAPT. MATTHEWS--LIAR & MURDERER
1866 (His Freedmen's Bureau lies are history now, still repeated)
#13 TOURGEE vs MCGEHEE--KKK 1860s & 1870s--grisly details
about KKK and end of Reconstruction
#14 WILLY SIMS & THE DANVILLE
“MASSACRE" or "STREET-FIGHT” (a reckless cousin who all by himself (some
said) may have ended Reconstruction in Virginia)
#15 GLENN-TUCKER, the JARNDYCE vs JARNDYCE OF I. T. --My family’s fight
against Choctaw corruption--story ending with 3 judges who ruled against
us--one died in alcoholic binge, another slit his throat (but lived), and third
had a leg cut off and died)
#16 DICK
COSTNER’S GALLANTRY AT WOUNDED KNEE--a provocative chapter--Sen. Warren is
right to want to rescind medals--but Dick deserves to keep his medal.)
#17 LEE SPARKS--ONE BAD COP --Houston white
thug who incited and doomed the Buffalo Soldiers in 1917
#18 DOVEY--BLACK COSTNERS--horrific story of black family driven from place to
place. [MY MOTHER WAS MARTHA COSTNER.]
Appendix--RACIAL DOCUMENTS--grim items about kinfolks--disposition of slaves in
wills, ads for runaways, auction ads for slaves, &c.
Now, the divesting myself continues. I am mailing big files to members of my family so any great niece or 3rd cousin can have the benefit of my 2 decades of research. Everyone can have 24 GB of documents on 46 family names. Each name has many items attached--104 for DELLINGER, 163 for GLENN, 173 for McGehee, for example. Some family names are not here. Who were the THOMPSONS? I do not believe in guessing. What's in the 46-name file is what I am certain of. I do not trust Amazon.com's DNA section on THRU-LINES. This is not TRUE-LINES. I think most of the "putative" ancestors are the result of wishful thinking being copied and copied by lazy cousins. There is a lot I may die not knowing. Can we get good DNA links to the 1600 Parkers on the Dividing Line? I can't clean up Geni, either. Get the link to Calhoun off! The trouble with a common name like Knox!
I also posted something I did decades ago--I transcribed (with some help) the isolated big Augusta Melville file for 1863. I am freeing myself. Melville Collection? off to the Berkshire Athenaeum, mainly, already. Other books? Ask me.
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