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.
