Last Thursday we went to hear Krista Tippett speak at St. Vladimir's Seminary in Yonkers. She was her usual eclectic self, drawing thoughts from science and from the arts, from Thich Nhat Han and from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and from Martin Luther King. She is extremely cosmopolitan while speaking about the very personal: listening, being curious, wondering. One thing she mentioned only in passing, though, really got my attention. She said that she is from Oklahoma, and it seemed to me that in this context, "Oklahoma" was shorthand for one thing, parochialism. And I'm not sure.
I have been thinking about the many Oklahomas that exist in the exact same geographic coordinates, so separated, in fact, that people who are right next to one another actually live in different universes from. The Oklahoma of the imagination only magnifies this. Consider Merle Haggard's 1969 song, "Okie from Muskogee." He was turned off by protests against the Viet Nam war and wrote and released what was received as a kind of patriotic redneck anthem. Weirdly, though, Muskogee is not an especially white place. It was the capital of the Creek Indian Nation and is still the home of a sizable Native American minority. Haggard himself grew up in California, although his parents were from Checotah, the part of Oklahoma that used to be the Creek Nation. Is eastern Oklahoma white, or native?
Oklahoma's most famous native son is easily still the early 20th century humorist, Will Rogers. Rogers was famously 9/32 Cherokee Indian. He grew up in Oologah, Indian Territory and his father was a prominent figure in the tribe. But Clement Rogers was one of those Cherokees who fought on the Confederate side in the Civil War. He was a delegate to the Oklahoma constitutional convention, which immediately segregated the state. One variant of the Oklahoma license plate says "Native America." Are Native Americans like Will Rogers actually people of color?
The first Broadway musical written by the team of Rodgers and Hammerstein was "Oklahoma!" It takes place in Claremore, in the old Cherokee Nation. Everybody is white, with the possible
exception of the character called Ali Hakim. Even the horror of the plot is whitewashed. Jud Fry attacks the protagonist, Curly McClain with a knife, but then it's Jud who dies... and he was a moody guy, anyway... and Curly doesn't really kill him, he falls on his own knife... and the cowboys' impromptu grand jury acquits Curly... and Curly and Laurey ride happily away in a surrey with a fringe on top. In the original of the play, Lynn Rigg's "Green Grow the Lilacs," the Jud character is named Jeeter Fry. The reason why all the white characters are so outraged at Jeeter's romantic interest in Laurey is that he is part Native American. Curley kills him for it, no ambiguity about it, and the kangaroo court exonerates him anyway. The climactic scene, then, is the lynching of the lone Native character! How idyllic.
Another famous Oklahoma of the imagination is John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath. It was the bestselling book of 1939 and won the Pulitzer Prize for best novel. The film version, starring Henry Fonda, was an even bigger hit and won John Ford the Oscar for best director in 1940. There are no Natives and no African Americans in
The Grapes of Wrath. The conflicts are all matters of social class: the Joads and their fellow Dust Bowl migrants on the one hand; and the bankers, planters and sheriff's posses on the other. It is worth noting here that the Joad's home in Sallisaw was actually
outside the Dust Bowl. But the Depression hit eastern Oklahoma sharecroppers very hard, financially and emotionally. White sharecroppers in the old Indian Territory were especially angry at not being landowners, because many of them had Native American landlords, at least earlier in the 20th century. Sallisaw is roughly one-quarter Native even today, almost 90 years after the events of the story. It is hard to imagine that the Joads didn't know any Native people. There are no people of color in the Oklahoma of this movie, or even in California. The Joads do encounter Indians while driving through New Mexico. But it is hard to believe that real life migrants from Sallisaw, in the Cherokee Nation, don't meet any Indians until they leave home.
I mention the phrase "Dust Bowl" so I am duty bound to segue into Woody Guthrie, the Dust Bowl
Balladeer. He is most famous for the song "This Land is Your Land." Like Merle Haggard a generation later, Woody got into country music radio in California, but unlike Merle, Woody was born and grew up in Oklahoma. Woody was from Okemah, in the old Creek Nation. His father Charles was most probably a Klansman and a member of the lynch mob that killed Laura and Lawrence Nelson in that town. Woody himself did nothing to hide that, and wrote multiple songs condemning racism (including that of his Brooklyn landlord, Fred Trump) but there is something about the imagined Woody that papers this over. Instead he is remembered as a troubadour of the working class, a working class as narrowly imagined as that of Tom Joad.
The last white Oklahoma I want to cite is that of Susan Hinton's 1967 young adult novel
The Outsiders. She wrote this when she was 15 and 16 years old and the world of the story is the world of teens in 1960's Tulsa. The book is still widely read and received further notice from Francis Ford Coppola's 1983 movie version. Which young 80's star
wasn't in it? The cast included Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macho, Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, and (the well-known at that time) teen idol Leif Garrett. Like several of the places named above, Tulsa was a part of the Creek Nation. Even today its population is 20% African American and 5% Native American. The Tulsa of
The Outsiders, though,
seems to be all white, and the social conflict is between the children of the country club set, called "socs," and the poorer teens known as "greasers." This should be no surprise. Susan Hinton wrote the book when she was a fifteen-year old junior at Will Rogers (who else?) High School. And Rogers HS wasn't integrated until 1973, almost twenty years after the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education! So in the 1965 of
The Outsiders, all the African American teens in Tulsa would have attended Booker T. Washington (who else?) high school... another universe.
How about the universe, imagined and otherwise, of other Oklahomans? Well, Ralph Ellison was from Oklahoma City and they are proud to claim him as an Oklahoman now. In his posthumous work,
Juneteenth, Ellison did address the simultaneously segregated and integrated worlds of Black,
white, and Native Oklahoma. At one point the Reverend Daddy Hickman reminds his adopted white son, Bliss, how many white souls he saved with the hymn "Let Us Break Bread Together on Our Knees." But Bliss has become the white-supremacist US Senator Adam Sunraider. Hickman remembers moments of unity:
That scar on my skull to this day from going to the polls with ax handles and pistols, some whites and Indians with us, and battling for the right. Long back, now Oklahoma’s just a song, but they don’t sing about that.
He directly addresses the white-washed Oklahoma of the Broadway show. So Ellison knows "Oklahoma!" but does "Oklahoma!" know Ellison? Ellison's
Invisible Man won the National Book Award for 1953 and it is on most lists of the best English-language novels of the 20th century. But how many people have actually read it? When it was published, the
New York Times critic greeted
Invisible Man with the oddly-ambiguous "praise" that it was
"the most impressive work of fiction by an American Negro which I have ever read." Wow.
Twenty years ago, Toni Morrison wrote Paradise. That seems like a really strange title for a novel that takes place in an all-Black Oklahoma town, but which opens with the line, "They kill the white girl first." I don't know what tiny proportion of Americans even knows about the existence of all-Black towns. Many of them were in Oklahoma, both because of the large number of Black folks who were members of the Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Cherokee tribes; and because of the large numbers of Black folks who moved to Indian Territory after the post-Civil War rise of the Klan in the old Confederate states. Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer in 1988 for Beloved. She won the Nobel in 1993. But despite her brilliance (and the lasting brilliance of her work) she is probably more famous for Oprah asking her viewers to read the books than she is for the books themselves.
Oprah made a beautiful, critically-acclaimed film out of Beloved, but it bombed at the box office, taking in a grand total of $22 million on a budget of $88 million. The movie "Beloved" was beaten on its opening weekend by "Bride of Chucky." Then theaters decided to stop showing it to make room for Adam Sandler's "Waterboy." I have no words. But there is no better way to explain why (white) people don't get Paradise. Even its inclusion in the Oprah Winfrey Book Club didn't stop readers, including literary critics, from being confused. The social conflicts in Paradise are between men and women and between the richer (and lighter-skinned) people of Haven and those of the novel's setting, the town of Ruby. What were white people to make of this?
The only film I can compare it to is John Singleton's (also 1997) "Rosewood." The all-black town in this story is in Florida instead of Oklahoma, but still. Starring Jon Voight and Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle and Bruce McGill, it had enough white characters for success, even if Bruce McGill did play a white supremacist murderer. And it was about white folks attacking Black folks, which is -- at least -- a familiar story line. There is plenty of fighting back, but the Black folks are defeated and their town is destroyed. This is a narrative that people understand better than an all-Black town still extant after the Viet Nam war, as in Paradise.
I also want to mention John Hope Franklin, born in the all-Black town of Rentiesville, Oklahoma and raised in Tulsa. He graduated from (of course) Booker T. Washington High School, and received his PhD in history from Harvard in 1941. Both his parents were Black Choctaws. His best-known work is From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. If you don't know it, you should. Dr. Franklin is important to understanding Oklahoma, too. Not only was he from a Black Native family, but he lived with the "state Negroes," those who moved to Indian Territory from the states. He moved to Tulsa just before the 1921 pogroms in which the African American neighborhoods were burned -- both from the ground and in aerial incendiary attacks! -- and armed white mobs moved into the streets shooting and lynching the
occupants. Franklin's dad, BC (Buck) Franklin was an attorney, and he saw his father mount the legal cases that allowed some Black Tulsans get their property deeds when it seemed that the Klan wanted to permanently purge them from the city after burning them out. I believe that Professor Franklin is largely responsible for preserving the memory of the "Black Wall Street" in Tulsa and of the the attacks that left it a smoking ruin.
What of Native Oklahoma? Nowadays few people still read the Creek Indian poet Alexander Posey unless they are taking a course in Native literature. He was the editor of the daily newspaper Eufaula Indian Journal. He was secretary to the constitutional convention for the proposed Indian state of Sequoyah, a proposal which Congress ignored when it merged Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory into the new state of Oklahoma in 1907. Posey may have been best known for his Fus Fixico letters. They were dialect humor, published as letters to the editor in the voice of a Creek full-blood. Much of this humor was so topical that -- unless you study the politics of the Creek Nation in the first decade of the last century: Crazy Snakes, Legus Perryman, Chief Porter -- it is impenetrable. Some of it, though, alludes to issues that people today will understand. In April 1903 "Fus" wrote:
Well, so Big Man at Washington was made another rule like that one about making the Injin cut his hair off short like a prize fighter or saloon keeper. Big Man he was say this time the Injin was had to change his name just like if the marshal was had a writ for him. So, if the Injin’s name is Wolf Warrior, he was had to call himself John Smith, or maybe so Bill Jones, so nobody else could get his mail out of the post office. Big Man say Injin name like Sitting Bull or Tecumseh was too hard to remember and don’t sound civilized, like General Cussed Her or old Grand Pa Harry’s Son.
People can still relate to the name changes and the hair cuts that were meant to end one's Native identity. And I love the subtle joke alluding to hiding that identity "if the marshal was had a writ." But I am endlessly repelled by Posey's racism against both African Americans and Black Creek Indians. Here is a sample from January of that same year:
So I was to Eufaula last week and stay all night in wagon yard with white folks and Arkansawyers that was come to town to get in debt for sowbelly and tobacco and molasses and things like that. We was walk 'round and see everything. We was go to depot and look at trains, but we was see nothing but lots a niggers. Maybe so they was fixing to go to Africa, or maybe so Muskogee or Wildcat.
Wildcat was an all-Black town and Muskogee, the Creek capital, had a large Black population, too. There is so much of that stuff in Posey's comedy that it becomes nearly impossible to read without concluding that he thinks he it white. But he also talks about why the white papers love stories about Indians that strike oil on their land, while somehow never hearing about people "behind the hills" who lose their corn patch because somebody else files for an allotment on their land. So, again, another Oklahoma.
The history of that Oklahoma of stolen allotments was written by Angie Debo in her book
And Still the Waters Run in 1936. White Oklahoma was still so hostile to allowing this story to be told that the University of Oklahoma withdrew its offer to publish and the book only came out four years later, from Princeton University Press. Debo herself, a white woman,
never received an academic appointment, despite having received the prestigious Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association for her first book. For years she was barred from teaching in Oklahoma in any capacity.
Just last month David Grann released
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI which tells the story of rampant conspiracy against Native oil lease holders, including being
courted and married by conspirators who later murdered them and their kin. This is all part of the Oklahoma story. Those white Oklahomans definitely knew there were Natives among them. When they covered up their crimes, though, they were also erasing the very existence of the people they robbed and killed.
Today when you visit the state of Oklahoma some of the important places in its history are ghost towns. Others have been swallowed by the growth of metropolitan Tulsa and Oklahoma City. But some have been simply plowed under, not returned to prairie and forest, but hidden under crops of soy and cotton and wheat. Other historic towns and ranches are underwater, flooded by dams on the Arkansas and Canadian and Deep Fork Rivers. The bankers and oilmen who won the battles for the identity of Oklahoma have obscured even the existence of its previous iterations, before the arrival of the Five Tribes on the Trail of Tears, before the arrival of the Boomers and Sooners, before the arrival of the oil companies. But the people are still with us. Some of them may be in California or Texas or New York, but they are still people. Some of them may now be African American instead of Black Indians. Some may be white instead of Native. But the stories shouldn't die. I think they are equally compelling as stories about the Dalai Lama. This is what I wanted to say last Thursday to Krista Tippett.
