COPYRIGHT 1 February 2023
Hershel Parker
WHO THE OKIES REALLY WERE
SOME OF THIS HAS BEEN VANDALIZED FOR ANOTHER CHAPTER
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 understood 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 many 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 debased 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 almost none 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.” If ancestors sailed here from Ireland, descendants assumed they were Irish. No, he was Scottish and German, censuses and DNA show. (In 1990 I learned that when Rogers bowed his head and muttered before a meal 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. He 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). Very few tried to keep in touch by letters. Many of the applications for pension in 1832 did not possess the family Bible with birth records (many had been destroyed by household fires) or else was not sure which brother or sister might have it and not sure whether or not that person was alive. 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 meant that many ancestors and other kinfolks were in the Revolution (most often against the British). 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 the memory of Okies in the 1930s, but often it 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 my Great Grandfather Rogers whom I saw on his deathbed early in 1946. Extreme poverty erases history.
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 Ona Costner married her 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. And as my Internet cousin Lois Gore says, if a Southerner is not kin he is 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, anymore, 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 or small farms 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 North and South Carolinians, 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, Tindalls, 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 early settlers, went east into Indiana. We don’t think of this, but Southerners from the western Carolinas 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 90 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 their accounts of battles or in their 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). Many Bibles with their family records, you learn, had not survived house fires. Many of the applicants did not know exactly how old they were, neither birthday nor 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 many survivors impoverished and crippled. 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 to 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 and then sweeping and sweeping. 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 in 1906, 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 their destinations, 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 exclude Hawaii and Alaska.
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. Many 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, or a candle. 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.
Family genealogists, I found in the early 2000s, had been swift to begin exchanging information online, and many self-trained volunteers turned semi-professional researchers were at work from the start of the 21st century, if not sooner. Early in the 2000s there was riches running wild already on the Internet--too wild at times still, based on wishful thinking like much that of the recent ThruLines on Ancestry.com, which highlights many hasty guesses. Ancestry.com frequently includes rare documents posted by generous amateur users, but also also puts much information behind “Private” labels (the message is “email me and beg”) when the whole point of genealogical research ought to be showing and telling freely.
Initially confused by wishful thinking that passed as genealogical fact (and even now having to ignore persistent confusion online, one Nabors merging with neighboring Nabors), I slowly learned to draw on my Melville skepticism and to winnow hundreds of documents, then as years passed thousands of documents, in order to identify some of my ancestors and other kinfolks on this continent, many who had come in the 1600s. At first, knowing I would be interrupted by work on Melville, I determined not to join any genealogical sites I had to pay for (how often would I use them in a year?) and to order copies of documents from archives only when I could not get something I thought I needed any other way. Depression Okies are cheap; I still cut toothpaste tubes in four parts so as not to waste any. Gradually I had to pay for newspaper access which I could not get for free and to join sites such as Ancestry.com.
What I found in the first years was fragmentary without much context, to be sure, even from the increasingly magnificent resources of the Internet. For every 10th great grandfather I identified, there were 4,095 10th great grandfathers very few of whom I could ever name. In fact, 4,095 was far too large: any 10th great grandfather was likely a progenitor several times over. In recent generations, I discovered, I had the North Carolina Scot Robert Ewart as 4th Great Grandfather twice. I delighted in fancying that I was empowered by that double infusion, for he had been, I learned, a Committee of Safety man in 1775, and father-in-law of a little band of King’s Mountain heroes. Another Scot, John Glenn, of Renfrewshire, was from the same clan as the astronaut, the DNA shows. My Glenn, I learned, fathered many half-Choctaw children as my 5th Great Grandfather, but he was also my 4th Great Grandfather, because a Mexican War soldier in southwestern Missouri, one story goes, would not take in a female cousin fleeing Civil War bushwhackers in Arkansas unless she married him. It’s possible I got my height (unusual in the 1950s) from old John Glenn, for his grandsons were exceptionally tall. My Jack Glenn was measured 6’ 5” in the Mexican War and his brother George at 6’ 4”. Did their equally tall cousin Sam in Kerrville, Texas, really shoot down hanging business signs he hit his head on? I remember from 1942 the extremely tall ancient Great Great Uncle Johnny Glenn who wore all black and a black top hat when he brought my stranded mother little baskets of new Spring vegetables. The more stories I learned after 2002, the more I loved these people as I rejoiced in their peculiarities and tried to see their traits in their living descendants.
What I wanted was American stories, but any Okie high-school dropout like me would have fantasized about kinship to Scottish and English royalty. By the time I learned about actual remote royal kinship I was an old man, so any such connection was more amusing than exalting. Because I have loved Hotspur since 1953, I delighted in learning that Owen Glendower, pompous and long-winded in Shakespeare, is (according to Geni) my 17th Great Grandfather. I have more than one blood tie to Henry VIII, but the fun is in being from a family even more disreputable than the Tudors, the Boleyns, Sir William Boleyn, High Sheriff of Kent, being my 13th Great Grandfather. (That sounds closer than it is, for there are 30-some thousands of 13th Great Grandfathers.) Being a Boleyn means I am 2nd cousin to the first Elizabeth, a few times removed, besides the kinship through her father. Even better for a scholar of literature, having read and loved Emma during the 1959 Christmas break at Northwestern (with no thought of studying the author or plagiarizing anything from her life or her plots or characters), it’s fun to be a blood cousin of Jane Austen, through Thomas Leigh, the mayor of London at Elizabeth’s coronation. (Austen's sister Cassandra rejoiced in that connection to Sir Thomas long before I did.) I was happy to learn that another direct ancestor might have been, really, the very man who stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum in the nursery rhyme, but I was old and did not want to dig back for shards of ancient glory to bedeck myself with. Still, who could resist learning of descent from the Bruce (something almost any Scot can do)? And I smile whenever I think of being 6th cousin to Rob Roy. A suspicious amateur, I had hooted dismissively at the McGehees who claimed that the Mackayhee who arrived in Virginia in the 1600s was really a McGregor but unable to use his name because King James had set out to destroy all living members of the family and to obliterate the name. Ho, ho, I thought, a fantasy of Americans wanting British connections. The Maryland Magruders, I knew, had written at least one whole book proving that they were high and mighty McGregors. No, they weren’t, but we McGehees were, DNA shows.
In fact, if any Southerner in a family got to Virginia in the 1600s any descendants are apt to be kin to some British notables and almost certainly to be kin to many millions of Americans. The Americans over five centuries will include warriors, politicians, farmers, many notorious bootleggers and western outlaws, and a scary number of modern serial killers. In Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck dropped names of famous Kentucky-West Virginia feuding families, having Turnbull say 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.’” In fact, I have McCoy blood myself, and Hatfield blood, not much of either. I can’t say that “it so happens that I am kin to both the Hatfields and McCoys.” This is not a matter of “so happening.” It’s a matter of white Southerners (especially those who have been on this continent since the 1600s) being kin, it seems, to almost everyone who has been around a while. As my double or triple cousin Lois Gore says, if you are Southern you are either kin or connected. And even if one brother went to Virginia another might have landed in Boston--a possibility I usually flee from rather than pursuing.
By the late 2010s I had a massive folder called “Ornery People” and a shorter, 10,000 document folder called Glimpses--consisting of page or so captures of kinfolks during revealing--indeed, fascinating--moments in their lives and (often) of American history. Much was in their own words (even from the 1600s and 1700s). I had accumulated documents in random order and at odd intervals, without focusing sharply on them. Because I am (intermittently) persistent, I found genuinely remarkable documents. When you don’t know family history and family stories, you respond with joy, and even love, at new stories. Ancestors become real. Recently, as I mention in a later chapter, I could find only one 1759 newspaper story on Indian raid on the Catawba river area, but it featured my first cousin Martin Dellinger, who had the wit to lie down in his rye field, out of sight. (A modern cousin, the author of From Yale to Jail, knew nothing about Martin or his own heroic Revolutionary North Carolina ancestors: he took pride in his unremarkable Boston ancestors. Since I wrote the previous sentence, Cousin David has come back to life in the movie about the trial of the Chicago 7.) In an 1844 newspaper I found three or four precious lines about double grandfather Robert Ewart who died in 1781. “During the war Maj. John Davidson and Robt. Ewart (a good Whig) very frequently came to my father’s, Jacob Forney, sen., to consult in favor of the Whig cause--Robert Ewart lived about one and a half miles from Maj. Davison and five and a half miles from my fathers.” Old Jacob Forney’s property was devastated when Lord Cornwallis and his army occupied it in 1781 during a pause on his way to Yorktown. This letter by his son Abraham, in 1844, in his 85th year, struck me as a miraculous gift. You really have to be a hunter to find such nuggets! My cousin Frederick Slimp, a Union man, wrote much of the History of the Thirteenth Regiment Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry (which includes a photograph of him). Then (looking for Moore cousins) I found a letter from Boone, North Carolina, in the Lenoir Tropic for 21 October 1885, about a visit to Tennessee: “Fred Slimp I had not seen for 22 years; looked old and broken. We were school boys together. Fred could outrun us all at school in playing ball, base, &c.” [Sic: “base, ball”] You look long enough, you find such surprise revelations, even if they are disturbing.
Internet genealogical research now may be (as is casually reported) almost as popular as gardening or pornography. Many other Americans have done searches such as I did and many have visited more graveyards and court-houses. I made only one cemetery tour, in 2007. I have not belatedly dedicated my life to study of my ancestors the way I dedicated my life to Melville research. In fact I continued to write books and many articles on Melville until 2019, when my Library of America Complete Poems appeared, but I have persisted to look for my family at stolen moments for two decades. I recognize that truly industrious researchers start earlier and go wider and deeper than I do, but I had behind me the training of decades of research on Herman Melville.
I found my stories about kinfolks in history books; exploration books; wills; land transfers; county records; early military records (the War of Jenkins’ ear, the French and Indian War and Lord Dunmore’s War); many dozens of Revolutionary pension applications from aged patriots; military records for all wars up through World War I, my cut-off point; other governmental records; a few family letters in county libraries (one to a grandfather of mine about the Cousin Milton of my chapter 10) and many in college or university collections; dozens of Silas C. Turnbo stories about the Cokers lovingly and intelligently made available online from Springfield-Greene Library, Missouri library. (The magnificent Turnbo was the Studs Terkel of 19th century Arkansas.) A Mexican captivity book was written by a a North Carolina Bell and Knox cousin gone to Texas. PUT ALL BOOKS AND ARTICLES TOGETHER
cousin; dozens of legal affidavits from relatives in the archives of the Bureau of Indian Affairs; hundreds of censuses; thousands 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. My step-GGGG Grandfather William Cocke, who labored to create the State of Franklin, published extant speeches in newspapers and wrote extant letters to Jefferson and Jackson. Several of my cousins gave speeches which are preserved; several were interviewed in famous books (such as Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s account of an early Arkansas Coker in his London Journal of a Tour, 1821. Several cousins contributed to books (notably Frederick Slimp); several wrote personal accounts such as John F. Hill description of his escape from a Confederate prison; Carrol Moore wrote powerfully about the North Carolina Bushwhacker murderers who got pensioned and protected as Union fighters; a Sims cousin (the Milton I mentioned) wrote eloquent paragraphs about his imprisonment in the Civil War in issues of Confederate Veteran. Men and some women (Aunt Margaret Adams, Grandma Abigail Rogers) performed feats of astonishing bravery; young Stephen F. Sparks and a friend bit down on ropes and swam across the Buffalo Bayou twenty-one times towing Sam Houston’s baggage just before the battle at San Jacinto. I bring to all this research what I have learned about historical research in a scholarly career spanning a decade more than half a century.
Every family now has at least one genealogist, but this book may, after all, be a unique genealogical and historical product. The idea behind it is not that my history is unique--it’s just it may be the first of its kind. Any Depression Okie, anyone whose family had been in Indian Territory since the mid to late 19th century, could now (like my neighbors in the 1940s, such as the Heflins) create a comparable family archive. Truly comparable: my mother was a Costner, and besides a multi-term Senator they had a famous actor cousin, and they had the Melvillean Wilson Heflin, whose posthumous Herman Melville’s Whaling Years I enriched with a unique lost typescript which “it so happened” that I possessed, and then wrote my most eloquent blurb for it. With the Internet any Okie 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.
The following stories are just samples of hundreds. When I found them, I was still focused on Melville but I was fascinated as I found stories of determination, daring, and endurance. I took private pleasure and derived strength from fancying that I had inherited traits from people I was learning about. I read about these cousins with delight and sometimes awe. What extraordinary people, and what lives they led! The chapters of this book, all written after the murder of George Floyd, omit much in their focus on Racial Reckonings.
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