“Cardiology” by Niklaus Faith

One.
Heart melts into ink.
Burns in the Arctic eternal night.
Melts snow to drips.

One.
Drip drips down manicured lawns. Fills thirsty, floral bellies.
Absorbs light.

One.
Day I’ll move this tower of stone.
And launch your brain into space.
Children of your children will sail past
Oh          so           slow.

One.
Child will spend his Weekends in a brothel in Spain.
The year of Our Lord one-thousand nine-hundred and thirty-three.
He will drink port and smoke French cigarettes.

One.
Cigarette will burn down a forest.
Give your legacy cancer.
Cause the heart to quicken her tempo.

Two hearts, glued together. . . .

Thunder growls through glistening teeth,
Exploring sonic sea-scapes. . . .
One low rumble.

Oh, One.
Bug dead on the moving sidewalk at O’Hare.
Brief images from the grandiose life it led. How vast.
One bug heart, and mine, and yours.

Nicklaus Faith is a self-described “homegrown Okie” whose poetry has appeared at The Curbstone Collective, a literary blog.

As a precaution to listeners, the following audio program contains emotional triggers that might distress those affected by bombings or wartime atrocities. Not recommended for children.

Produced for the 2012 TCF ShortDocs Challenge.

This podcast uses these sounds from freesound: deep bass rumble 2 by ERH, USAT Bomb by sandyrb, 10 by CosmicD, Chip016 by HardPCM, Dronetail46 by Jovica, ambulance siren by vedas, city noise by gezortenplotz, public spaces by digifishmusic, Bell Tones by johnnypanic, healing bells by klankbeeld, Drone2 by HerbortBoland, walking.shadow by dobroide.

Read the poem below.

For Papa Johnny Hodge, my Great-Great Grandfather.

under a crying elder willow
we meet the 107 degree shade
bearing thirsty earth
from which i sprang.

a safehouse next door to
a tinderbox church.
sanctuary from hot

lone star nights.
though your face is hidden
i feel you
in the folds of mama’s hands.

in my blood
i hear you. calling
beyond the tired summer
crops to bring us here.

we were the last to know
ritual precedes emancipation.

This poem appears in the chapbook, bloodsoil (sooner red), published by Voices from the American Land in 2009. Copyright owned by Quraysh Ali Lansana. Quraysh Ali Lansana, born in Enid, Oklahoma, is a poet and professor in Chicago, where he directs the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University. Lansana has written or edited fifteen books.

Note: This article was originally published August 1, 2011.

Deborah J. Hunter’s poem “Jazz on a Diamond-Needle Hi-Fi” is performed live in Central Park by Tin Pan. Full poem below.

“Jazz on a Diamond-Needle Hi-Fi”
by Deborah J. Hunter

Mama dropped the needle and my heart jumped.
It was fascinating, titillating,
be-boppin’, foot stompin’, traffic stoppin’, biscuit soppin’,
donut dippin’, daytrippin’, corn sippin’,
make me wanna shout,
cuss somebody out;
it was without a doubt,
the most sinfully rappin’, toe-tappin’,
thigh slappin’, happenin’ event.

It was the sun risin’, moon smilin’,
bees hummin’, lovers comin’,
mamas cryin’, souls dyin’,
life goin’ on
goin’ on
goin’ on.

It was Coltrane shatterin’ shackles,
Bird making the night air moan,
Dizzy gettin’ busy with the brass,
Brubeck redefining time,
Miles moving mountains meter by meter,
Ella bouncing lightning bolts off the sky.

It was jazz.
Ooh, jazz.
Yeah, jazz.
It was ss-ss-ss-ss-ss-ss

jazz.

Tulsa resident Deborah J. Hunter is an award-winning poet, spoken-word performance artist, and actor. Since 1997, she has facilitated poetry workshops and worked as a poet-in-residence in schools and community programs across the state. Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications, and her chapbooks include The Red Shoes and Other Poems from the Edge.

For my mid-life crisis, I just bought a really, really expensive painting. It was like a 17th century Dutch painting of a monkey eating a peach.

My name is David Sedaris. I read a description of myself somewhere as young and I thought, “Oh, no.” I’m 55 years old. I went to the Goodwill when I was in Hawaii and the woman behind the counter said, “Are you eligible for a military or a senior discount?” And I said, “How old do you have to be for a senior discount?”

55. Nothing I can do about it. But it seems pathetic to try to hide it.

And I decided I’m going to be the older guy who wears Japanese clothes. When I say Japanese clothes I don’t mean, like, fashion. Because it’s too sad when I spend money on things like that because, you know, I have teeth like a ferret. And it just doesn’t, uh, one eye looks off in this direction and the other looks out in the other direction. It’s just too sad, but Japanese clothing, that can work for the older gentleman.

I go to Tokyo, I’ve been like, I don’t know, 6 times or something. And I’m going back in January. And one of the things I found on my last trip, it was like a business shirt but it had buttons that were enormous. I mean they’re bigger than a quarter and smaller than a coaster. You know, somewhere in between. And I thought, I’m going to buy this shirt and I’m going to get so many compliments on my super buttons. But I think people just think that I’m old and I’m arthritic or something and so I needed big buttons.

And I bought a pair of pants that have horizontal stripes and they come up to way past my navel when I pull them up, the bottom of the pants. They’re like, eh, I’m tired of this and they just kind of peter out. Like they kind of peter out somewhere above the ankle. I tried them on for my boyfriend, Hugh, and he said, “Everything about these pants is wrong. Everything. Everything.” But they’re not, it’s not like these are too young for me or they’re too trendy. Because they’re not. They’re just Japanese.

So I’m going to be the older guy in Japanese clothes. It’s just like, yeah, but you know when I see a clown, I think, he looks good.

(Question from Abby) What, like, happened that caused you to start thinking about, I want to be the old…

Well, I got old. I mean I got old. You don’t think about it when you’re young. And then after a certain point you think, well, I better start thinking about it because I’m old. And, and I’d like to be. I mean, as I get older everything, everything, irritates me.

My boyfriend’s mother, you should hear her, “Oh! Look at her she’s just beautiful. Now look at that girl. Oh, oh! Look at those girls over there.”

And I tell her she sounds like a predatory lesbian. But she’s just so happy for young people. If they have a party in her building she just says, “Oh they’re young and they need to have fun.”

And so I don’t know, I have to back up or something to be more like Hugh’s mom and just be more tolerant and (sighs).

Oh well.

Want to weave some bread for yourself? Get in on the action every Wednesday night at Temple B’Nai Emunah.

Ian Frazier talks with us about his book Travels in Siberia. He discusses the struggle to capture the essence of a foreign country and the horror of mosquitos.

Deborah Willis reads her Imaginary Oklahoma story “Wailing Wall” and talks with us about the inspiration behind her story. The post features “Like a Miracle,” written by Missy Mazzoli and performed by Victoire for their album Cathedral City. 

In the late 1970′s, Mary McAnally led a poetry workshop for the inmates at Stringtown Prison in Stringtown, Okla. She taught at the prison twice a week for three years, helping many of the prisons get published in literary journals across the country. In this segment, we hear McAnally discuss the movement to rehabilitate prisoners. We also hear two of the prisoner poets, Milton Gracen and William “Indian Bill” Hogner, read and discuss their poetry.

Transcript

Mary McAnally: When you feel like you’re linking your life arm-and-arm with the life of people like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, people who have even sacrificed their lives for their cause, it’s a holy feeling.

My name is Mary McAnally.  In 1960 I was a student at TU and Martin Luther King came there to speak.  He urged students to come down south and sit with him in the sit-in demonstrations that they were having.  The lunch counter sit-ins were the attempt to get government to require that restaurants allow black people to eat at restaurants where white people eat.

That spring, which was 1961, I had just turned 21; I organized the only Freedom Bus that went from Oklahoma down south.  It’s during spring break; we played cards and told jokes and boys and girls met up.  You know, 40 college kids [laughs].  It’s an exciting, incredible group of young people.

We went to a hotel that King had set aside for Freedom Bus people.  When King came and said, “Okay, let’s go, we’re going over here to this restaurant.  You five go there and you five go there,” and you know, boy, we marched in tune.  I went to a restaurant that was a trolley car restaurant – you know, they used to take old trolley cars and turn them into a restaurant.  It was in a part of town that was where the white part of town was beginning to get colored.  I use the term as they did then.

So there were colored people wanting to eat at the restaurant and being refused, so, we went in and we were mixed race, sat down and you could feel the hostility and within any time at all the waitress would come over and said, “We can’t serve you here.  You’ll have to leave.”

We didn’t get right up and leave; we said “Why can’t you serve us?  You’ve run out of food?  We’re hungry and we’re from Tulsa, Oklahoma and we came here to get something to eat.”  They ended up calling the police and the police came in and arrested us.  There were five in my group, but by the time they took us to jail there were already about 80 people at the jail.

Took six hours, I know, for them to process me and took me almost that long to get to the telephone to call my mother to ask her to wire me $25 for the fee; which she did.  King told us, he said you might be arrested so be prepared for that.  But if you are, you’ll be in good company.

Transcript

I don’t believe that Tulsa has the right to say that your freedom of assembly expires at 11 o’clock, and that’s why I volunteer for civil disobedience. I was arrested the second night.

I was one of the ten that were arrested and pepper sprayed.

A total of 13 of us stood out there on the grass and the police were coming up behind us. I remember I was just thinking okay, okay this is it.

As jazzed as I am to be thrown into the back of a police van, it’s not about a personal thrill or personal fulfillment; it’s about making sure that everybody knows this is a matter that’s worth fighting for.

On one side would be freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and the other side would be the city’s right to enforce the curfew. It’s a law that the city put in place to keep the riffraff out of parks after hours.

My name is Brian Horton. I’m a second-year law student, I go to law school. What we’re going to do is file for an injunction. The injunction is to get the police to stop enforcing the curfew, saying that the right to protest, the right of free speech is higher than the city’s right to enforce the curfew.

To publicly gather and protest, express your grievances, is the most important thing in our society. If we don’t have that ability, it’s very difficult to make those grievances known, to make the true critical mass behind those protests known. That’s where the power to change is drawn from and that’s why it’s in the First Amendment.

Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…

Or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…

Or abridging the freedom of speech…

Or of the press…

Or the right of the people peaceably…

Peaceably to assemble…

To assemble…
To assemble…

To assemble.

Do you know what assembly means?

Not really.

Not really?

That’s what we’ve been doing––peacefully assembling.

The right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

My name is Frank Grove.

My name is Anastasia Harlon (ph).

I’m Marshall.

My name is Minnow Sharp (ph).

I’m Minnow’s mom.

I’m Geri…

My name is Shannon Guss (ph)

I’m Stephanie Lewis

I’m Samantha Pritchett

I’m Daniel Lee

And I’m a member of…

Occupy Tulsa…

And of course the greater Occupy Wall Street movement.

In this segment, the Occupy Tulsa protestors tell the story of what happened the night they got sprayed, and TPD delivers their side of the incident. This piece features “Scary Boat Ride” by The Lothars.

Transcript

Jason Willingham: Have you ever tried to pick up somebody that weighed 200 pounds and was interlocked with another person that weighed 200 pounds next to them, it’s just not possible. Pepper spray is a safe alternative to physical force.

I am Jason Willingham (ph) with the Tulsa Police Department Public Information Office. The Occupy Tulsa group began to set up a camp basically at Centennial Park which is located at 6th and Main in downtown Tulsa.

Protestors: (Chant) …our fight! Who’s fight? Our fight! Ooh-ahh, ooh-ahh…

JW: The City of Tulsa has an ordinance that no person shall be inside a city park after 11 P.M. So, officers went down to the location…

Tulsa Police Department Officer: (Megaphone) Occupants of Centennial Park, this is the Tulsa Police Department.

JW: There was a group of protesters that refused to leave the park…

Tulsa Police Department Officer: (Megaphone) All persons in the park are in violation of City of Tulsa Municipal Ordinance Title 26.

JW: They interlocked their hands with one another, their arms with one another and resisted arrest. At that time pepper spray was used.

Eli: I’m Eli, this is Massar.

Massar: And I’m Massar.

Eli: We were sitting in a circle. I was about four people over from Massar. The officer, he walked up to me and he was standing over my left shoulder and he said, “Will you stand and sign this citation?” I said, “No, sir.” He was like, “Well, if you don’t stand up I’m going to mace you in the face.” I said, “Officer, you are the 99 percent, do what you need to do.” He maced me in the face at pointblank range, I mean the can was like right here and he got me straight in the eyes.

JW: We go by a Use-of-Force Continuum that every department in the country uses. The first use of force is the officer in his uniform. Secondly would be a verbal presence. Third is pepper spray. You know, the worst thing that we can do is start wrestling around on the ground with a 200-pound man, one of our officers gets injured. One of the suspects gets injured, you tear a shoulder, you break an arm or something like that, so when you look at the potential for injury, this was clearly the best way for us to approach it.

Eli: We sat in county jail while handcuffed and the only time that we received any medical attention was with one of our members three hours after the fact because he was having breathing difficulties, even though he’d been telling the Tulsa Police Department since he had been arrested and was sitting in the van three hours before [then] he was having breathing difficulties. It took them three hours to get him a nurse.

JW: Pepper spray is the oils from cayenne peppers. It is a very, I mean, your eyes lock shut, your sinuses open up, you feel like you can’t breathe; it’s not pleasant. One time I car in my car and reached the seatbelt over and somehow it got into the trigger of the pepper spray can and sprayed inside the car. All of our officers are sprayed in the academy. Anybody that’s been doing the job for very long at all has probably been sprayed accidentally in the field, so we’ve all done it. We’ve all been there and we all know what it feels like.

Eli: We do still understand that they were doing their job. We wouldn’t want them to lose their jobs over this because we know that they are still people, they’re part of the 99 percent, they’re trying to support their families and our hearts go out to them.

Protestors: (Chant)…the people, will never be defeated. United, the people, will never be defeated. United, the people will never be defeated. United, the people will never be defeated…

Lori Ostlund reads her short story “Of All Places” from our series Imaginary Oklahoma, and tells us how she felt like she entered a time warp the only time she passed through Oklahoma.

Lori Ostlund’s first collection of stories, The Bigness of the World, received the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and was a Lambda finalist and a 2009 The Story Prize Notable Book. Stories from the collection have appeared in the Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Georgia Review, among other publications. She was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She lives in San Francisco but is currently the Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Transcript

Lori Ostlund: Hi, my name is Lori Ostlund and my story is called, “Of All Places.”

His mother said it was Oklahoma that was making him nuts, blaming the whole state when the only place he ever went was to work, which was 4.3 miles away, meaning that he actually inhabited a very small part of Oklahoma, certainly not enough of the state for it, collectively, to be blamed for making him nuts. Still, it was true that he had gone through his life, thirty-four years, not being nuts and then he had moved to Oklahoma and suddenly he was. He told his mother that maybe what had made him nuts was not Oklahoma but everything leading up to Oklahoma, his wife telling him that she might be in love with one of her students, though his wife taught eleventh graders, and his mother calling every two seconds to see whether he’d left her yet. “Maybe it’s you making me nuts,” he told his mother, and she said, “Don’t be silly.”

“Of all places,” his mother had said when he told her he was moving to Oklahoma, and he thought that the same could be said of the state she lived in, which was New Jersey. When he moved to New Mexico, where he met the wife who was now in love with a sixteen-year-old, everyone said, “Lucky you,” people who had never even been to New Mexico, and when he’d moved to Minnesota, everyone said, “It’s cold,” as though he had no idea, but when he announced that he was moving to Oklahoma, people either said “Oklahoma?,” like a question, or they began belting out the song from the musical, though most of them knew only the first word, which was “Oklahoma,” singing it like it was a sentence on a rollercoaster, or a canoe gliding quietly down a river and then dropping straight over the edge of a waterfall.

Abby Wendle: Thanks.

LO: You got it?

AW: Yeah.  You said you lived in New Mexico?

LO: Uh-huh.

AW: Did you come to Oklahoma ever?

LO: I passed through Oklahoma.  I ate at an Applebee’s there one time.

AW: There wasn’t any other…

LO: Yeah.

AW: There was no other option?

LO: It was one of those pulling off the interstate after driving for 12 hours or some crazy –coming from Minnesota, wanting to make it back to Albuquerque but realizing we needed to eat and didn’t want to invest in lunch time, so we ended up at Applebee’s.  And I remember [indistinct] because I was younger then but I kept getting called ma’am.  Now, I understand.  Now, I’m [indistinct] and everyone calls me ma’am and so I stopped being freaked out about it.  But at the time, it felt like I’d entered a time warp because everyone was calling me ma’am at the Applebee’s. Anyway, okay.

Well thank you Abby, I enjoyed doing this very much.

AW: Great, thank you, Lori.

LO: Bye.

AW: Bye.

Transcript

Paula Poundstone: I oftentimes drive by my house. And my kids will say to me, “You’re driving by the house.” And I’d say, “Who the hell are you and what are you doing in my car?” I have a really bad memory.

I’m Paula Poundstone and I’m a standup comic/writer/panelist on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me on NPR.

I started in Boston doing open mike nights in 1979 and then moved from there. Well, I didn’t move exactly. But, I took a Greyhound bus around the country to see what clubs were like in different cities and I went to Austin, Texas. I went to Denver, Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Chicago. I think. Maybe Eugene, Oregon. Lots and lots of places. I probably have only come to Tulsa like maybe every several years. But, no, I don’t have any specific memories at all. My guess is when I get there I’ll go, “Oh yeah, I’ve been here before.”

I was one time at a club in Southern California somewhere. I took my daughter with me and we got so lost trying to find this place. It was just impossible to find. And finally, I get there and we go in and there’s a guy and he greets me. The guy who ran the place he greeted me in a very friendly way, he greeted me and my daughter says, “Mom, do you know that guy?” And I said, “No.” And she says, “Well, have you ever been here before?” And I said, “No.” And we get into the dressing room and there’s an 8×10 of me that I’ve signed saying how much I enjoyed the club, which indicated that I had been there before. And I said, “Oh, okay. Well, maybe I’ was here once.” I swear to you, I’m walking down the hall to use the ladies’ room, there’s another 8×10 with a different date on it saying how much I enjoyed the club. I was about to go onstage and there was yet a third. So my – I’m not real good at tracking where I’ve been.

My manager always says, well, you know, if I’m working some place she’ll say “Oh, that’s a red state. You might have a hard time there.” I don’t find that at all.

You know, the truth is what you really get a sense of when you go around the country a lot? It’s we’re more alike than we are different.

After graduating from high school, Joe Brainard left Tulsa in search of art and culture and freedom. He ended up moving to New York City in 1960 or ’61 where he met and befriended such literary and artistic icons as Frank O’Hara, Andy Warhol, John Ashbery, the list goes on.

His brother, John Brainard, also an artist, followed Joe to NYC over a decade later. In this segment of the Short So Long, we hear John’s story of learning about his brother’s homosexuality and his thoughts on how place impacts the art you create.

Featured in this segment: a communal reading of Joe Brainard’s poem “Autobiography,” John Brainard reads from Joe’s book I Remember, and a recording of Joe reading “Tuesday, February 18th, 1971,” at the Poetry Project, St. Mark’s Church, New York, March 31, 1971.

Ryan brings an accomplished background to Tulsa with him every year. He played with Olatunji Drums of Passion, founded by the late Babatunde Olatunji, a renowned Nigerian musician and an ambassador of African culture. Since Olatunji’s passing in 2007, Ryan has played with various other drum groups.

Transcript

Gordy Ryan: [singing]Well, you’re mine.  Yes, you’re mine dear, Delta Lady.  Oh, you’re mine.  Yes, you’re mine dear, Delta Lady.

GR: [laughs] There you go.

My name is Gordy Ryan.  We are truly passing through Tulsa here, a very quick trip but very intense and deep experiences with the people.

I came up in music with a traditional Cuban apprenticeship and drums and then I went to – I was playing drums in Lima, Peru.  I was told to go meet Babatunde Olatunji in New York City at his center in Harlem.  And so, I became, I’m going to say part of the Drums of Passion.

The original motivation of Olatunji was to show people the beauty of African culture.  And even though I have mixed blood, I’m primarily Caucasian; I was the first one in that group.  And the first time I got – I came to Tulsa; I was brought by the University of Tulsa African Association because they’d heard about me and knew I played with Olatunji.  Well, when I walked in the door the first night, it was a Friday night, I walk in and the cats all look at me like, “Oh.”[laughs]  But, this is a gauntlet I had crossed before because with Olatunji we would go into a place, we might go into an all-black place and people are, you know, people look at me, right.  You know, “Hey, what’s this guy doing in this situation?  This is the best band in the world, African band, why is this guy in that band?”  But, you know, the music starts and hey, it doesn’t matter anymore.

That first time I came, you know, the African brothers brought me in and it was great.  I know there’s tend to be more cultural isolation between black and white in Tulsa.  But, I haven’t felt it.  I haven’t felt the prejudice.  We had a very intense cultural mix.  See, we’d have people from different bands joining us.  So, we had guys from the black reggae group, we had people from a group called WhirlyGig that did like Allman Brothers and Grateful Dead covers.  They’re really good.

Yeah.  I’m sort of a specialized sampler you might say.  [laughs] But, the African music is a total theater.  It’s your voice.  It’s your hands playing the drum.  It’s your face, the expression on your face when you’re playing.  The way you connect with each other and the audience.  There’s the way your body moves.  If you’re sitting down and we have a move going, the pelvis is moving.  You’re moving on your center point.  You’re feeling that.  You feel a tremendous energy of vitality passing across your body.  And that has a very cleansing effect and a very vitalizing effect so it actually brings more life into your organism and more awareness into your organism.  That’s the personal level.  Then, you’re playing with a group of people and you’re starting to feel the intuitive oneness with all of those people in the moment.  Then that expands out to now a greater part of all humanity on the planet.  I’m not kidding.  This is really, you know, this is really hard is you suddenly start, “Ah, this is not a whole bunch of little people running around the planet.”  All this is actually – there is actually a planetary being that we are all, we are that.

Transcript

Jim Chlebda: Wilma, up to her final years, was writing something every darn day.  She had a typewriter years ago but as she got older, she was just longhand, longhand, longhand.  She had piles of paper and piles of scraps, piles of scraps.  Old mail before she through it away, she’d just flip it over and used that to write poetry on.  It’s just a part of her.

My name is Jim Chlebda.  Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel is a very dear friend.  I would get tickets to different events because of this publication I was doing and I would just say, ‘Wilma, you want to go see Merle Haggard?”  “Yeah, sounds great, boy.”  So, off we’d go to see Merle Haggard or Johnny Cash or Freddie Fender or, you know, quite a number of good shows.  She just loved it, you know.

Out here in California, we called her an okie poet, a folk poet.  She took that word as not a word of derision, she really wore it as a proud badge because of where she’d been, what she’d been through and how far she’d come.

She started writing when she was eight-years old back in Creek County in Oklahoma.  In 1936 she was with her family migrating to California because of the mess that had been created in Oklahoma for anybody that was a sharecropper.  Wilma said, “Why’d we come to California?”  Well, it was acute starvation.  You know, why would we stay in Oklahoma if we had nothing left?  People were jumping off trains and committing suicide.  I think she always tried to reconcile growing up in Oklahoma as a little girl thinking she’d always be there and getting wrenched out of there and brought to California as a young woman is just a whole different reality that she had no choice, you know?  [Indistinct] was leaving and they were in it.  When they got to California, they were living in like bunkhouse tents.  They were picking out in the fields and she had this little box of poems that she kept under her bed and she was working in the fields one day and she came back and somebody stole this box of poetry of hers and she was just completely crushed.  She had some things she could of been bitter about.  She had an amazing poem that she wrote about the loss of all of her brothers.  Allen gone, Keith [sp] gone, Harold gone, Kenneth gone.  It’s a beautiful poem but how do you reconcile loss?  She wrote her way out of a lot of the stuff that was sort of challenging.

In 2003, I think it was, she broke her hip and then, I think in ‘04 she had a stroke.  It actually affected her right hand and she wasn’t able to write.  I think that was the cruelest blow to her after over the 80 years that she savored her writing ability.  That was her link to the planet.

As she was failing I said, “Wilma, you know, we got to keep some of this going forever.  We’re going to get you up on the Internet,” and she would call it the worldwide spider web.  And I remember visiting her at home when she was bedridden and bringing her oversized copies of some of the page layouts.  She was just so tickled to see that, “Wow, this is a great way to get stuff out there and everybody in the world who wants to log-on can see it.”  She just would never even contemplate something like that when she was writing her poems and stuffing them in shoeboxes that she’d stash under her bed.

Alan Heathcock reads us his story “Streetlamps” from our Imaginary Oklahoma series and explains the family history behind the unusual coupling in his work.

Alan Heathcock’s fiction has been published in many of America’s top magazines and journals, including Zoetrope: All-Story, Kenyon Review, VQR, Five Chapters,Storyville, and The Harvard Review. His stories have won the National Magazine Award in fiction, and have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories anthology. Heathcock is currently a Literature Fellow for the state of Idaho. A native of Chicago, he teaches fiction writing at Boise State University.

Transcript

Jeff Martin: Imaginary Oklahoma is an ongoing project in which some of today’s most important and influential writers combine with artists to provide a fictional take on this place we call home. Through a wide variety of voices, styles and literary devices, these works prove that “Oklahoma” is much more than a place, it’s an idea.

Abby Wendle: Hello?

Alan Heathcock: Hello.

AW: Is this Alan?

AH: This is Alan.

AW: How you doing?

AH: I’m doing great here.

AW: Where is it that you live?

AH: I live in Boise, Idaho.

AW: Boise, Idaho.  Have you ever been to Oklahoma?

AH: I have, yeah.  I’ve been there a few times.  I have family who are from there.  My dad was born in Oklahoma and my great-grandfather was a circuit preacher and he lived in Oklahoma.  In the piece I wrote I mentioned a woman Purified Fox and that’s my great-grandmother who was a full-blood Cherokee girl and he married her and of course back in that day that was very controversial.

AW: So does this story come from your grandfather or your great-grandfather’s experience?

AH: Yeah.  I was trying to imagine him.  What that meeting might have been.  There’s no record of where or how they met really.  Don’t have that story at my disposal.  But I always wondered about it because it’s kind of such an unusual couple.  A man traveling around, you know, meeting a full-blood Cherokee girl and how it might have gone.  And so, I’m a romantic at heart I guess so I romanticized what that meeting might have been, try to see if I can extract something, something special out of it.

AW: Would you like to read it?

AH: I would love to read it.

AW: I would love for you to read it.

AH: Okay, here we go:

Streetlamps.

He used to be a preacher, but now worked hanging power lines across the vast and dusty flats. Oklahoma, far from home. Towns bloomed with electric light, and in one a barefoot girl played violin by a wide brown river.

Her song made him think of the Sabbath, of how he would hold children by the nose and the small of their back and lower them under the water. The girl turned to his touch, her skin the color of the water, her eyes deep. “Our world is energy unharnessed,” he said, before he could stop himself. “The river’s water electricity, its banks the conduit.”

This was how it happened, how he’d made everyone in his life leave him. He stared out over the roiling current, wanting to switch off that thing that would not leave him. But then she touched his wrist, and her eyes smiled up at him.

“Do you like my dress?” she asked. “I made it myself.”

The dress was of light tan fabric, the hem filthy with red dirt. He nodded, told her his own mother once had a dress like that. She told him her name was Purify Fox, then intently watched his face, like a challenge. He didn’t know what to say and said nothing though he thought the name was beautiful. She looked away. Violin across her lap, she held her face in her hands and began to cry. She broke away and hurried off through the reeds and up the bank. He followed her into the hills, keeping his distance though he saw her glancing back over her shoulder and knew she was leading him somewhere. Soon they entered a lightless mineshaft. They walked until there was no light, and she took him by the elbow and pulled him deeper still. The darkness seemed to open, a cool breeze trickling over him. Here her violin echoed, sounding like ten, sounding like the entire world had become music. Then, in the still quiet, they stood against each other, the backs of their hands touching.

“Songs fade, but remain in the air,” she whispered. “We breathe it in and it becomes a part of our skin and hair, our blood. We are a lifetime of songs. I have so many songs inside me.”

He kissed her, felt, finally, somebody understood him.

At dusk, they climbed a hill high above the river, the once dark town now bright in the distance, the new row of streetlamps switching on.

AW: Thank you.

AH: My pleasure.

If you’ve got the innate knowledge and courage to go snag yourself a catfish, then you’ll need to skin it and clean it before you proceed with this recipe. Of course, you can also just go to your local grocer’s and buy some catfish filets.

According to Gary Altizer, it’s a tag-team: the men catch and skin the cats, the ladies usually cook them up. This is the recipe he suggests for “salty, deep-fat-fried” catfish steaks.

Salty, Deep-Fat-Fried Catfish 

Ingredients
Catfish filets
A dozen eggs
A dozen beers
Flour
Salt and pepper
Lawry’s Seasoned Salt
Vegetable oil

Directions
How much catfish depends on how many you’re feeding or how much you catch.

Beat together, in a big bowl, enough eggs and beer to cover the filets.

In a second bowl, mix flour, salt and pepper to taste, and a good dose of Lawry’s Seasoned Salt.

Fill a fryer with vegetable oil and place over medium heat.

Dip a catfish filet in the beer-egg mix, making sure to get all the fish covered. Then dip it into the seasoned flour, covering one side then the other.

Lay the filet gently into the hot oil, taking care not to splatter yourself. How long you fry it depends on how much your filet weighs. As a rule, cook until golden brown.

Carefully remove the filet from fryer and place on a platter lined with paper towels to drain. Repeat until all of the filets are cooked. If you have a “mess”—meaning, a slew of fish—you’ll need to either keep them warm in a 250-degree oven or serve them right up. Taste the first one for yourself to get a feel for how salty they are. Add more salt and pepper to taste.

We like our catfish pretty salty.

On the side
A few catfish serving suggestions:
Cole slaw—something good and tangy.
Hush puppies—might as well, as you’ll have a big batch of oil already going.
Ranch-style beans—season lightly, if at all.
Rice—a great big fluffy bowl of it.

Transcript

Gary Altizer: It’s a lot easier if you’re hanging them up off of trees.  Like get a big spike nail and put it to the bottom lip and then you skin them, pulling their skin down.  Lay them up into a patties, big fish steaks.  Some people like to barbecue them and the women usually cook it.  I’m not a cooker, I’m a skinner.

My name’s Gary Altizer.  I’m from Calumet, Oklahoma.  I am fourth generation Okie noodler.  We call it hand fishing.  You just go along feeling the bank until you find a hole.  When you stick your hand in, if a fish has eggs it’ll come out and bite you.  You don’t have to find the fish he’ll come and get to you.  My brother and I, we hand fished our whole lives.  I remember my first fish.  We was in some rocks and my dad found a hole for me.  It was probably two or three pounds but really chewed my hands up but I was excited.  They’ll scare you.  You know, you’re sticking your hand in a hole, you can’t see nothing, they come up and bite you and you jerk all those teeth around his mouth, thousands of little bitty ones.  They can really do skin damage to your hand.

I’ve caught a 50 pound flathead.  He’s probably the biggest one I ever caught.  After I get off work at 5:00, then get my hand fishing clothes, you don’t want to ruin your good clothes, you use the same jeans and the same shoes, the same shirt.  Some guys don’t wear a shirt but I usually do.  I always wear shoes because you get your feet cut up.  And we went down at the river and we caught it in a car body, in the trunk.  This is an old car that was in the water, covered up with sand and water.  Years ago they put a bunch of them against the bank to keep the river from washing out their property.  They get rusted out and get holes in them where the fish can go inside of them and that’s where you can catch a lot of catfish in the rivers.

If you don’t know what you’re doing it’s pretty dangerous.  Once me, my brother and a friend of ours went noodling and we found this hole.  And we couldn’t reach the back of it so we had this bright idea that I’d swim underwater first and then my brother would hold my feet, swim under it and then his friend would hold his feet.  And whenever I run out of air I’d kick my feet and then my brother kicked his feet and then my friend would pull us both up.  Well, he pulled my brother out but I had jeans on and there’s a root, a tree root under there and it caught my pant through the loop and I was hung up and they were both pulling on each leg and I was about to drown but I didn’t panic.  I jammed my arm up against my body and pushed my arm up where I could get it back to that belt loop and I popped it lose.  And when I did I come clear across the creek, they were both pulling so hard.  I thought I was going to die.

Abby Wendle: Did you like see a big fish at the end of the tunnel?

GA: No.  I didn’t see nothing at the end of the tunnel.  I just wanted out of there.

Building a Frog by John Wooley

Guide the scalpel
with milk-wrinkled hands
fine-honed point tracing
delicate veins.
Gently peel back
transparent membrane, expose
organs, vessels.
Rest briefly, balance the point
on the tiny nerve
that runs down the leg
to the splayed foot.
They feel a sudden twitch
and jump
little wavy lines dissecting
all the ponds
in the universe.

Transcript

Rufus Newsome: We weren’t picking cotton. All we did were chop the weeds and all. You’re chopping, chopping, it was hot. I imagine those rows being like two and three miles long. That’s what I imagine. Of course they wasn’t that long. But it seemed like that though. They was really long.

I didn’t know what a farmer was then. I knew what I was doing and I was good at it, I knew that.

I was born in Mississippi in Sunflower County. We lived on property owned by whites. And this is what we did. We went to the field. I started like when I was 11-years old. I was young. I was a young boy, really young. It wasn’t just me and my brothers and sisters, also. You started early in the morning. You started like six o’clock and my mother always made a lunch for me. And she probably had like a peanut butter sandwich and so you waited for your meal, you waited for – you waited for lunch and once that was over with the day was almost over with. Once you had that lunch then everything went quick. But I did that from 11 all the way up to 18 when I graduated from high school to make money for our school supplies and then also for the household. It was good money for the work that I was doing because I knew I would come home and give it to my mother and she would buy things and pay bills. I remember that. I was from a poor family.

My mother worked at a chicken factory. It was the only place there were blacks and whites who worked together. She would bring home the leftovers, the chicken backs, legs and all and this is what—this is the meat that we ate. We couldn’t afford anything.

And so we grew our vegetables; greens, sweet potatoes. My mother always said, “Boy, you can grow anything like your uncle.” She never said a green thumb. She didn’t know what that was but she always said that all because I could grow almost anything, yeah. I could grow sweet potatoes in – of a refrigerator just as large as your head, I could do that. That’s when I discovered that I was a farmer because I worked with the soil. He that works with the soil is a farmer.

Hi, my name is Rufus Newsome and we have a small community farm. We grow sunflowers, okra, corn, peas, beans, watermelons, cantaloupe, squash, herbs, chickens, fresh eggs, goats, rabbits, along with honey that we raise from our bees.

We’re trying to help our community by trying – teaching them about the value of good food, the natural food. We’ve gone out to all the families and we’ve helped them to set up their own backyard gardens. You know, at least over a dozen, maybe even more.

There’s a serious problem in the black community when it come to self-sufficiency like the food stamp program, welfare, and I’m not—no, I’m not saying get rid of it but you have two and three generations sort of that are on these programs and there seems to be no way of stopping it.

As long as folks have kids they have to eat. And being poor – and I know what it is, I know what it’s like not to have food and – but when you’re buying chips and hotdogs and candy and that’s not helping the family, their families at all, either.

I want people to experience what I did when I was younger at growing things. Working with the soil and all, taste their own food, to taste the natural food so that they can be healthy and strong.

Transcript

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: The Klan came and dragged him out in the night and they beat him badly, almost to death.  This was when my grandmother insisted that they get out of there, that they were going to kill him or burn down their house in the middle of the night.  She was terrorized and the kids were terrorized.  So, you can say the Klan, their terrorism actually worked.  The little town where I grew up, my grandfather’s town was made up of small farming communities.  The poverty was widespread and dire; very rough life, living in tents and dugouts.  The socialist movement and IWW had wanted to end that.  People have a very distorted vision of, you know, what a socialist is and that it might be un-American, but the Industrial Workers of the World and the Socialist Party was very popular in many, many counties of Oklahoma.  They would have these huge meetings in the summer.  Like tent revivals, only they were – they’re socialist gospel revivals.  Whole families would come, they’d camp out for, you know, before harvest for a month.  All these speakers come in like Mother Jones, you know, famous speakers.  And they had very positive visions of what they wanted to build, direct democracy; institutions that were more democratic.

The Socialist Party was a regular political party that ran candidates for office at every level.  My grandfather ran for insurance commissioner.  Emmett Victor Dunbar was my grandfather.  He was very much a grassroots organizer.  He organized the wheat thrashers who came through every summer; they’re following the crops.  These, you know, young men, actually a few women too.  He talked to them about the IWW and get them to sign up, and then you know, give them some contacts and the next place they were going to go if they had any needs or anything, or medical needs.  In our town, it was the Ku Klux Klan that crushed the organizing that my grandfather and others were doing in the whole county.  My grandfather came to be the head of the school board.  They were having a school board meeting and the Klan came with guns and then white robes riding horses and they had a firefight.  We, kind of, mystify the Klan as a very exotic organization, when they’re just death squads.

My grandfather renounced them.  There was a scene that my father used to tell me his proudest moment, proudest of his father.  And there was a community meeting taking place in Piedmont.  Everyone was gathered in the back of general store.  The mayor was talking and these Klansman in their, you know, in their sheets and their faces covered, came marching in, you know, military style and marched up to the front and stood in front of the mayor and confronted the whole crowd and started bullying and threatening people.  So, my grandfather who was there with my grandmother and all of their children sitting on the front row, got up, and walked out.

They were the only ones to walk out.  You know, the Klan had pretty well captured the community with threats.  It was really the downfall of the IWW and the Socialist Party under that repression.

I’m Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and I grew up in Piedmont, Oklahoma.  I have a doctorate in history from UCLA in Los Angeles.  And I – when I took Oklahoma History in the 6th Grade or whenever they start teaching it, there was nothing in there about any of these things that my father had told me.  So, this is a heritage that’s very precious that they don’t even know about.

Transcript

Randy Holloway: When it snowed he’d wake me up in the middle of the night and take me over to the Brady Mansion to make me shovel it off the balconies because he was afraid the ceiling wouldn’t hold the snow in the middle of the night.  But I mean that was one of the things, you know, that I liked about him.

My name is Randy Holloway.  I worked for Tim for about, off and on, 15 years.  He would buy houses.  I would fix them up and he’d sell them.

I did all his carpentry work, painting and plumbing.  Well, I’m not really a plumber but he told me one time, “Don’t ever tell anybody but I’m a plumber.”  Plumbing can be really dirty.  You know, down and dirty.  You know, he just didn’t want anybody to know he did it.

He always ran around all the time with a suit jacket and then he had the blue jeans and a tie.  Tim had a lot of class, you know.  You know, he had a reputation.  Everybody knew Tim.  They all knew his houses.  In case like he’d buy a house to just turn and we’d just go in there and do the basics on it.  We didn’t do anything special.  But he really liked bigger houses.  He can expand his horizon and use his ability to be creative.  He would just sit there sometimes for hours just staring, cup of coffee in his hand, trying to figure out how they wanted it to look.

Late night he’s early 2000, he bought the Brady Mansion.  His girlfriend at the time talked him into it.  She says, “You’ll be a part of Tulsa’s history.”  The Brady Mansion’s pretty grand.  It has one, two, seven bathrooms.  It has four huge columns out front, this gray stone.  It has a nice balcony upstairs.  But I mean it was rough when he got it.  It was all sectioned off into apartments.  All the ceilings had been lowered.  It had no central heating air, plumbing problems; all the trim was caked, and caked and caked.  It was just – it was a dump.  It looked like a crack house inside.  I mean, it was that bad.  It was terrible.  And I couldn’t, I thought, “Oh man.  I can’t believe this.  I can’t believe he bought something like this.”  We dug and dug and dug and then tore stuff off the walls.  We tore out walls, tore out walls and tore out more stuff.  And I saw what was behind it and I thought, “Oh yeah, this is going to be all right.”

The crown on the ceilings is what was really amazing.  It had so many facets to it, it is just you don’t see anything like that anymore.  It is old.  You know, nowadays everything’s wham-bam hurry, you know, and it doesn’t have the uniqueness of that old crown.  You know, it was wild.  And he was proud of that, you know I mean, there’s a lot of history in there.  And he—Tim was, you know, proud of Tulsa.  He always wanted to make a – do something like the founding fathers.  You know, take Brady, he made the Brady Hotel, so Tim redid the Brady Mansion.  You know, that’s how he was.  He was a character.

Transcript

John Wittington Franklin: I have memories from my grandfather, memories from my father and my own memories of Tulsa.  And every time I come here I see how the city has evolved.

I’m John Whittington Franklin, the son of John Hope Franklin, the grandson of Buck Colbert Franklin.  I’d been coming here since I was two or three-years old.  We visited relatives.  We visited friends.  And they lived on Greenwood.  And I have memories of the house situated with vegetable gardens and fruit trees.  Have no recollections as a child meeting any white people in Tulsa at all.  I lived in that very closed all-black world.

When I was here for the last time with my father, we did an interview together about his experiences in Tulsa.  And he concluded with the story that I had heard many times of when he became a boy scout.  He’s very enthusiastic about doing a good deed a day.  And he’s looking for the opportunity to find when he can do a good deed.  And he was walking downtown and he saw an elderly white woman with a white cane waiting for the light to change.  And so he said, “Here’s my opportunity to do a good deed today.”  So he went over and he asked the lady if he could help her across the street.  And she held his arm and halfway across the street she asked him, “Are you white or colored?”  He says, “I’m colored, ma’am.”  And she said, “Take your filthy hand off of me.”

My grandfather, the late Buck Colbert Franklin was here during the Race Riot in 1921.  My grandfather had moved here to practice law on Greenwood at two separate offices.  And later in June of 1921 my grandmother and my father who was six and his sister who was seven were poised to move to Tulsa.  They were packed.  They were ready to move.  When the black community was destroyed and burned to the ground there was no place for them to move to.  And for years I’ve kept a photograph on my desk of my grandfather practicing law in a tent.  My grandmother, my father and his younger sister had to remain in Rentiesville for another five years until they were able to rebuild Greenwood sufficiently for them to move and resettle here.  For many years, black families were afraid to talk about the riot because they knew that people in power could wreak havoc on them.  White families were sworn to secrecy, to not discuss these – what happened in 1921.  And so there are generations of people who grew up in Tulsa black and white not knowing about the riot.  And it was really – as I continued to learn, it was at the 75^th anniversary of the riot that a group of white children asked the questions that no one else had dared to ask.  “What happened here?  Why?  Why don’t we know about it?”

And so it’s in recent years that people have come to acknowledge what happened.  That people have opened the archives of the Red Cross, of the Historical Society, of the paper.  So it shows you that over time, issues that were taboo have at least been broached.  And now I know white Tulsans and black Tulsans.  So my horizons are expanding.  And my knowledge of Tulsa, both in the past and the present is deepening.

In the early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan had been so active in Tulsa, Oklahoma – doing everything from holding parades to organizing lynch mobs – that the Governor of the state declared martial law in August of 1923. A month later, the national guard launched an investigation into the Klan’s activities – over 700 people testified. Tate Brady, a prominent business in Tulsa at the time, was called to the stand to discuss his role in the Klan. This Land Press presents a reading of Brady’s testimony, starring Anthony Florig as Tate Brady and Michael Mason as the interrogator. The full transcript can be read below. A full copy of Brady’s testimony before the Oklahoma military tribunal, along with the testimonies of others, can be found at the Western Heritage Collection, in the papers of Governor Jack Walton, at the University of Oklahoma Libraries in Norman, Oklahoma.

Click here to read our feature story “The Nightmare of Dreamland: Tate Brady and the Battle for Greenwood.”

W      T     BRADY,

Called as a witness, having been first duly sworn, testified as follows:

BY MR. STEVENS:

Q  What are your initials?

A  What is that?

Q Your initials?

A  W.T. Brady

Q Your address?

A  620 North Denver, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Q  Mr. Brady, were you present in Mr. S. R. Lewis’ office when a conversation was had between him and Mr. Minor Merriweather regarding certain activities of the Klan?

A   Yes sir; I was.

Q  Just state that conversation as you remember it in your own way.

A  Well, as I recall it now, Mr. Lewis called me over at the hotel; it was some ten or twelve days or two weeks before the election, as well as I recall the time now, in 1922, and he called me over and said Mr.Merriweather wanted to see us—wanted to see me and wanted to see us together, and I went over there as well as I recollect now, Mr. Lewis and Mr. Merriweather were in Mr. Lewis’ private office and he talked to us about—what do you want?  Want me to tell what we talked about?

Q  Yes. Yes; tell the whole story

A  He talked to me some time previous to this; I had been taken before the San Hedrin of the Klan.  I was a member of the Klan here at one time, and tried on a written charge that I was—that I had supported Tom Owen for Governor, inimical to the interests and contrary to the instructions of the Klan.  I think that was indictment number one, or substantially what it was, and a further indictment or further count that I was at this time—this was after the primary—supporting Jack Walton, a jack Catholic, they called him, I believe, inimical to the Klan, and I was asked some other questions.  I believe I was asked the question if two men were running for office and one was a Democrat and a Catholic and the other was a Democrat and a Klansmen, which would I vote for, and I answered that by saying that when I came to this country under Republican carpet bag rule, the Indian was first, the negro second and the white man third, and added to that that I was all Democrat and always voted the Democrat ticket—

Q  Just a moment—

A  Yes, sir.

Q  Mr. Brady, after the charges had been made against you on account of your supporting certain men for the office of Governor, were you banished from the Klan by the San Hedrin court?

A  When they asked me the questions and when they asked me the last question, I says, “No man can tell me how to vote”.  I says, “I have in my home the original records—some of my father’s membership in the original Klan, and I think you are a disgrace” and I considered I was out, and I learned from other members I was banished.

Q  You considered you were banished on account of your political activities?

A  Yes sir, and Mr. Merriweather’s purpose that day was to tell myself and Mr.Lewis, as well as I recollect now, the way he expressed himself was that the Klan had acted illegally; that he was Grant Titan of this province; that they had no right to do that and that he was there for the purpose of restoring us to full membership.  He was talking to both of us at the time and he was stating about the hardships that he had.  He stated that he didn’t want us to feel hard toward him; that he had had a hellf of a time; the way he expressed it, to hold these fellows in line.  That he had had a half dozen Mer Rouge affairs in his province and told about—in a general way—I have forgotten the places, but he told there was one up here about Drumright and one at Henryetta and he spoke about what he called the Coffeyville case which he said had been done by members in his province.  I forget all he did say.

Q  But you understood from his conversation that there had been murders similar to the Mer Rouge affair in Louisiana, committed in his jurisdiction and within his knowledge?

A  Yes sir, he said there had been half a dozen cases such as the Mer Rouge affair.

Q  Did he tell you anything about his knowledge concerning any of the whippings within his province?

A  Only just in a general way.  He said he was having a hell of a time holding them down; that the boys wanted to hold them down, and he talked like he was against it and wanted to hold them down, and that he had had a hell of a time hold them down.

Q  Your belief was that the Klan had been taking certain people out and whipping them?

A  Yes, sir.

Q  And he did not approve of it and he did approve of certain other mob activities of the Klan?

A  Yes, sir.  I took it that he was opposed to the Mer Rouge business and went stronger on the whipping.

Q  Was Mr. S. R. Lewis banished from the Klan for a similar offense to that which you have been charged with?

A  I have been informed he was charged in the same indictment I was charged on.  I told him that as far as I was concerned, that I never wanted to go back and I wished it was so I could go in the Federal Court myself and bring a suit to prevent them from using the name “Ku Klux Klan”, as it was a disgrace to a man like my father.

Q  Mr. Brady, did you ever have any conversation with Minor Merriweather concerning the military committee of the Klan?

A  Yes sir; he said in this conversation where he said he was having a hard time controlling them—he referred to his military committee; he was talking about his military committee.

Q  Did he state to you who the head of the military committee in Tulsa was at  that time?

A  I don’t recall that he did.

Q  Do you know who the head of the military committee was at that time?

A  Well, I have been informed by members of the organization that it was Mr. Consolvo.  I don’t know of my own personal knowledge.

BY COLONEL HUTCHINSON:

Q  The military committee acted on Mr. Merriweather’s direction?

A  Yes, sir

Q And by his orders?

A  Yes, sir.

Q  Did Merriweather indicate in any way that there was anyone else that had any authority over that committee besides himself?

A  Well, he stated that he was having trouble controlling his military committee.  He indicated that they went stronger than he wanted them to go, I imagine.  I don’t know just what he meant.

Q  What I mean is whether he indicated anybody else besides himself had control over it, and if he was the commander and chief?

A  He said he was the commander and chief, and they were under his control, and he was the Grand Titan of this province, and referred to the matter of our expulsion; said that was wrong; that he had supreme power, and he would set that aside and so forth and so on, and reiterated that he was in complete control.

Q  And the military committee acted under his orders?

A  Yes, sir.

COLONEL HUTCHINSON:  I believe that is all.

(Witness excused)

John C. Walton Papers, Box 14, folder 27, Proceedings of the Oklahoma Military Commission in the Matter of Klan Activity of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries, Norman, Oklahoma. Used by permission. 

Cattle Rustling in God’s Country
Transcript

Jeff Emerson: It finally dawns on you that these cattle are nowhere in the woods, these cattle are nowhere to be found.  We’ve hunted the roads and stuff like that for – and talked to neighbors till we’re blue in the face.  And then when you finally find the gate where they’ve been going in and out of, you feel kind of violated.

Rustling is big time right now.  Cattle prices, commodities are just expensive, corn, oil, everything.  But cattle prices are way up.  And so what used to be an old $300 cow is now a $1,000 cow.  There’s a lots of cattle stolen.  I mean 10,000 head last year in Texas and I think we was on track for 3,500 or something like that in Oklahoma in 2010.

It’s actually pretty easy believe it or not.  With my cattle all I have to do is go, “Ah-hoo!” and here they come running.  Because you don’t want wild cattle, you want your cattle to be around you.  You want them used to you calling them and stuff like that and so when they hear the, “Hoo-hoo-hoo,” when they hear somebody call, here they come.  And then they just – they funnel them down into a pen back at their stock trailer and they just run them into the stock trailer.  You know, in a matter of a few hours they’re in Texas with them.  Or they’re in – anywhere.  And then there is a sale going on every single day of the week almost somewhere within 200 miles of Tulsa.  I mean, there’s even sales on Sundays in some places.  So they can load those things up and a sale at a sale barn, you can just pull up there and you can just say, “I’m Joe Blow,” wait for the cattle to sell and get your check and go.

My name is Jeff Emerson of Natural Farms in Tulsa.  We had some cattle stolen off the farm, rustled off the farm about a year and half, two years ago.  I counted on the day after April Fools’ Day.  And then we counted again; brought them in and count them again on the fourth of July weekend and we were a minimum of 36 down.  And we hunted the farm, and hunted the farm and, you know, went around, drove around neighbors and stuff.  But you can see where there used to be an old gate between us and a neighbor and had a little ole chain and lock through it and it had been sitting there for 10 years and never been opened and all of a sudden you could see where it had been opened.  They cut the chain, cut the lock.  There was traffic back and through, hoof traffic back and through there.  We ear tag them.  But an ear tag you can cut out easily.  Boom, you can have it gone.

A lot of the cows that where stolen would’ve been having calves.  Those calves, some of them where going to be the ones that we’re going to be butchering.  That’s really impacted us now because we’re not necessarily in the cattle business; we’re in the meat business.  We do all our own processing.  Make our own sausages, and everything like that; smoke our own meats.  People would come to us to actually get a steak.  So instead of having a full pen full of cattle or, you know, on feed, now we’re down some.  And so sometimes people come in and say, “Okay, I need an arm roast.”  And I’m like, “I don’t have an arm roast.  I’m out.”  You know, and it probably – it’s going to be a few more months before we’re able to make that up.

We know who actually did this.  It’s just the proofing – trying to prove it is so [indistinct].  The last thing the Department of Ag told us was go get a private investigator.  Well, they stole a $100,000 worth of cattle but it’s going to probably cost me $50,000 and so at some point in time you have to say, “Okay.  I can’t spend anymore.”  It’s so bad.  Here you are, you’re having to pack a gun around with you and you’d hate to just kill a man over an old cow.  But it is your asset and it’s just like him breaking in your house and stealing a necklace out of your drawer.  It just makes you madder than hell.

Transcript

Steve Smith: My name is Steve Smith.  But I like to go by the name of Professor B. Loony.  Because I like be loony with the b-loonies.

A long time ago, I was a chaplain in a children’s hospital.  And as a chaplain I’m often called in for emergency situations, which means that the situation is pretty much over by the time I get there.  But there’s always someone awake in a children’s hospital.  And so I found kids and we would goof off with the balloons.  Sometimes I use the puppet back in my old days, I used my little ventriloquism frog, Fritz Ribbit is his name.  And there is a young man who came into our hospital.  The only problem is I never saw a parent there.  So he’s a very angry young man.  He had a curvature of the bones in his legs.  The process of fixing that in those days was in essence to break the bones and rotate them and make them grow straight.  I had heard that the operation hadn’t gone well and there was an abscess that formed in the leg.  A little bit of dead skin, a hole, just a mess.  And so when he woke up after surgery, I expected all sorts of angry words and everything like that.  And came in; I decide to have my frog with me to be safe.  The frog said, you know, “What are you in for armed robbery?”  You know, the kid said, “No.  I’m in here because there’s this blankety-blank-blank hole in my blankety-blank-blank leg.”  And I was thinking, “Well, what am I going to say?”  The problem with ventriloquism is sometimes words pop out of your subconscious.  They come through the frog.  So, the frog goes, you know, “Well, what are you going to do with it?”  And the kid goes, “Do with what?”  And I then said, “What are you going to do with that hole in your leg?”  Well, he said that he could put an 8-track in his leg.  And the joke was, well, he’s got the 8-track in his legs and he’s got batteries in his pockets and speakers in his socks.  And it’s just a game to the frog and I and the kid played together.

Eventually there was a lot more damage to his leg than was then things just weren’t going well.  And so he lost his leg from the knee down.  And when I found out about that I went in expecting The Exorcist, you know.  I didn’t know what was going to happen.  But when I walked in he showed me the little brochure.  And I said, “Yeah.  Yeah, I know about that.”  And he said, “Well, look at it.”  And I said, “Okay.  Yeah, I’ve seen it.”  I opened up the brochure and, you know, it had the aluminium bars and all the foam cut outs and everything like that to show what the leg looked like.  And I go, “Okay.  Yeah.”  And he goes, “Look, we can put the speakers in the leg.”  Now, how does that work?  You know, I don’t know whether this is God talking through a frog.  It wasn’t my idea but there’s a part of me that thinks that somehow by looking into, “What else can you do with it?”  He came up with an answer of how he could deal with his problems.

Transcript

Michael Mason: Today, in America, you can buy a gun without anybody knowing about it and it’s fine.

My name is Michael Mason.  I’m the Editor of This Land.  And I went to the Wanenmacher Gun Show to buy my first gun.  As I approached the expo center, I was imagining a kind of almost a gun carnival atmosphere where, you know, maybe there’d be people juggling the guns out there and, you know, I don’t know what I was thinking.  But going in the, you know, the atmosphere there was much more akin to say a flea market on steroids, I mean it was just a huge, huge area that was just completely occupied by hundreds, if not, thousands of tables of guns on display.  While I was there I spoke with Joe Wanenmacher, the creator and organizer of the Wanenmacher Gun Show.

Joe Wanenmacher: I am the producer of the world’s largest gun and knife show.

MM: Joe’s a really sort of a grandfatherly-type guy that you wouldn’t expect to be such a gun aficionado.

JW: More than 40,000 people will go through the doors this weekend.

MM: Why such huge crowds to this particular gun show?

JW: Well, it’s been around since 1955.  It has a good reputation and…

MM: Is it also that it’s just Oklahoma’s a friendlier place to buy and sell guns?

JW: Yes.  And in Oklahoma and Tulsa County, we have no restrictive gun laws.

MM: And he went on to explain to me how if I, you know, bought a gun from a federally licensed seller that it would take about an hour or two.

JW: The Oklahoma dealers are the ones who could sell you a handgun.  They will take your information and call in to the FBI and this essentially says, tells them that you are not a criminal or you are not a mental patient.

MM: The last time I held a real gun, I must have been about nine or ten-years old and it was a rifle.  And I was way out in the country.  And I fired it.  And the kick knocked me off my feet and everyone there laughed at me and thought it was really funny.  And I’d never had much interest or fascination with guns; I’m pretty much a gun virgin, I guess.

So I went off looking to buy my first gun and thinking that there would be like a bunch of federal hurdles that I’d have to jump through.  And then I found this guy.

Private Dealer: That’s the only one I have for $200.

MM: This guy is a private dealer.  And private dealers don’t really do background checks.  It boils down to the federal government just doesn’t require them to.  For private dealers, it’s just a transaction.

What’s the protocol for buying one?

PD: Nothing, you just give me the money.

MM: Really?  Okay.

So I gave him $200 and he gave me the gun and I was now a gun owner of a totally untraceable weapon and you know, it took me maybe 30 minutes.  It sort of taught me a lesson that I don’t know that it’s effective to really legislate gun sales or not.  It’s an illusion in my experience.

Brisket and Slaw

Certified Angus brisket (choice or prime)

Head Country Barbecue Rub

6 ounces Head Country Primer Marinade

6 ounces Marshall Brewery Company’s McNellie’s Pub Ale

2 tablespoons canola oil

1 head cabbage

1 cup mayonnaise (preferably homemade)

2 tablespoons yellow mustard

2 Granny Smith apples

Directions

1. Rub the brisket with a mix of canola oil and Head Country Barbecue Rub. Place the rubbed down brisket in a pan in the fridge. Marinate for 6 hours, enough time for the salt in the rub to suck up some of the meat’s moisture and get the rub’s flavor soaked into the meat. (The canola oil helps the rub stay put.)

2. Pull the brisket from the fridge, and build a fire in a smoker, using cherry and pecan wood. (Logs, if you can find them. You’ll need a lot of wood.) Put the meat into the smoker on top of the grill rack and cook for 4 hours.

4. Test meat with a temperature probe until it feels like it’s moving through soft butter. The meat is “cooked” at 165 degrees. Start testing with the thermometer at 195 degrees and don’t go past 205.

3. Take the brisket out of the smoker and place in a foil pan. Pour 6 oz. of Head Country Prime Marinade and 6 oz. Pub Ale onto the meat in the pan and cover with tinfoil. Let it sit for 3 hours until the meat is tender.

5. Chop cabbage and apples into chunks and toss in a bowl with the mayonnaise and mustard until well blended.

6. Serve the brisket and slaw with a loaf of Wonder Bread, Head Country Barbecue Sauce, pickles and a pile of napkins and paper plates.

Transcript

Wes Alexander: You’ll find especially in this part of the country that people have their own coleslaw.  You know, is it mustard-based?  Is it mayonnaise-based?  Do you use Miracle Whip?  For god’s sakes I hate Miracle Whip.  And they’re loyal to it like people are loyal to football teams.

My name is Wes Alexander.  And today’s Okie dish is smoked brisket along with Grandma Mermon’s coleslaw.  Mmmm…[laughs]

My earliest memories with my grandmother are, you know, from her telling me things about how to specifically prepare food.  Both of my parents were teachers.  And so what that meant to me was I had to get up early while they went to school and then I had to go school too early.  And then I got home at 3:30 while they got home at 3:30, 4:00, which is fantastic, but their whole day has been focused around school, they’re hungry, they want to relax, we would always eat an early supper.  And so mom got into – probably because she’s a product of the ‘50s – casseroles and all of these things.  Well, on the weekends I would get to go spend time with my grandparents.  And so, on the weekends there would be fried bacon and eggs.  And grandma, she would do chicken fried steak and what she called skillet fried potatoes, all these wonderful, wonderful things.  But I would come home weekend after weekend after weekend and say, “Mom, it’s time for fried chicken.  What’s going on?”  She’s like, “Eat your tuna noodle surprise,” whatever it is.  My mom is a wonderful cook, she’s not going to appreciate any of this, but ultimately I had asked too many times for chicken fried steak or something that was grandmother’s specialty and she said, “Fine.  Get in the car.  We’re going.”  And we went over there and I stood at my grandmother’s, you know, apron strings and learned to do all of these things.  And she showed me how to fry chicken and chicken fried steak and all the things that I always wanted.  And so at 11, 12, 13 years old I kind of took over the duties in the house of cooking dinner.

Coleslaw is one of those things that she’d always just made it and I’d always just enjoyed it.  But, as I started to get older, you know, and I got interested in barbecue, there was some things that just go with barbecue.  Coleslaw, of course, was part of that.  And the significance of the coleslaw or the interesting part of it, if you will, is there’s apples in this coleslaw.  You know, my grandparents would’ve lived through the Depression and, you know, apples were expensive and still, you know – still are expensive and revered.  And that was not something you were just going to have every day.  You weren’t going to chop up a couple of, you know, high dollar apples and throw them into a salad and that wasn’t going to be part of your subsistence.  Your subsistence was going to be, you know, whatever was hanging around that day.  Did we have some eggs from the chicken?  You know, do we kill the chicken on Monday?

This coleslaw belongs to certain holidays where, you know, it’s typically tied to events that were centered around family gatherings.  Like my dad would make a request on his birthday for maybe an apple pie or something and there would be chicken fried steak and there would be these skillet fried potatoes and there would this coleslaw.  You know, all of this type of food, this is family food.  You put it in a big bowl.  You put it in the middle of the table, you pass it around.  And that’s, you know, really, that’s where I get all this love of food is that it was really a way that my family, you know, cared about each other.