This Land Audio Producers Abby Wendle and Sarah Geis visited the area the day after the tornado hit, and made this portrait of survivors who were in two of the hardest-hit spots: The Plaza Towers Elementary School, and the Warren Theater.

Music
“Attempt to Draw the Line” by The Lizard Police

Additional Info
This story was originally produced, in a slightly different form, for the CBC’s Day 6.

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Inside the square glass castle of Tulsa’s City Hall last week, the grandson of a Tulsa Race Riot survivor, James L. Johnson, implored the Tulsa City Council to change the name of downtown’s Brady Arts District. The district’s namesake is W. Tate Brady, a member of the Ku Klux Klan whose actions incited the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot.

“I don’t call it a riot,” Johnson said, choking back tears. “I call it what (my grandmother) called it: a massacre. I haven’t been downtown in three years because of the things she told me happened there.”

Johnson and six others spoke of the hurt they felt at the commerce and art thriving under the banner of Tate Brady and the disrespect it showed for the tax-paying survivors of the riot and their descendants.

Kristi Williams, who organized the Coalition for Social Justice and is leading the charge to oust the Brady name from Tulsa areas, said that having Tate Brady’s name “does not symbolize a unified Tulsa and is an insult to the tax-paying survivors who live here.”

Williams explained it this way: “The historical society here said Tate Brady made huge contributions to Tulsa—and he did, he put money into Tulsa. What if Timothy McVeigh’s family were rich, and they put a lot of money into Oklahoma City, and Oklahoma City said, ‘Regardless of the past, we’re going to name this district the McVeigh District’?”

What’s In a Name?

When the Tulsa Race Riot broke out in the Greenwood area on May 31, 1921, white mobs invaded the thriving black community, burning buildings to the ground and forcing residents and business owners to flee. The Red Cross estimated that 300 died, although some historic accounts still stick to the 38 victims documented by death certificates. Thousands of homes burned to the ground.

One of Tulsa’s founders, Tate Brady, was among several white men who volunteered to keep watch the night of May 31 and the early morning hours of June 1 as the riot raged on. He told the Tulsa World he saw “five dead negroes” that morning. One of them had been dragged behind a car with a rope tied around his neck. Clearly Brady was present in the area; we don’t know what he did or didn’t do that night. Brady’s presence during the riot was just one episode among several where he was involved in political violence. We know that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan by then, as established later in a 1923 publication Proceedings of the Oklahoma Military Commission in the Matter of Klan Activity in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

In 1995, the Greenwood Cultural Center’s exhibit “The African American Experience” was the first to reveal Brady’s involvement with the Ku Klux Klan. A 2005 report by the U.S. Department of Interior called “The Final 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Reconnaissance Survey” [pdf] once again outlined Brady’s involvement in the Ku Klux Klan.

Finally, in September of 2011, This Land Press published an extensive history of Tate Brady in the article “The Nightmare of Dreamland,” by Lee Roy Chapman. The article revealed that Brady not only was a Klansman, but that he brought national Ku Klux Klan leaders to Tulsa for recruitment purposes. Following the riot, the article revealed, Brady attempted to usurp land from the citizens of Greenwood, and then allowed the Ku Klux Klan to build a large temple on property he owned.

The legacy media in Tulsa has largely downplayed Brady’s involvement with the Ku Klux Klan. For example, the most substantial discussion in the Tulsa World prior to the publication of “The Nightmare of Dreamland” was a lifestyle section article on a tour of homes by Randy Krehbiel, entitled “Brady Mansion Tops Tour.” It took issue with the Greenwood Cultural Center exhibit, stating “There is even less to indicate (Brady) had anything to do with the Klan” and sourced Brady’s family to deny Ku Klux Klan involvement.

The Klan of that period struck terror into the heart of black people, but it’s easy to forget that blacks weren’t their only targets. Angie Debo, one of the premier historians of the Southwest and Oklahoma, quotes the principles of the Oklahoma Ku Klux Klan in her novel Prairie City: “The Ku Klux Klan is a white man’s organization…a Gentile organization….we restrict our membership to native-born American citizens….a Protestant organization.” In a city where the Catholic and Jewish communities are so integral, Brady’s name becomes even more inflammatory.

The Brady Name Dilemma Today

Community leaders calling for the renaming of the Brady areas are primarily focused on the highly visible “Brady Arts District” name.

The business owners in the Brady Arts District are chagrined by the activism. They’ve been building the Brady brand for the past several years in anticipation of the growth stimulated by the new baseball park and this year’s opening of several arts organizations in the neighborhood.. Members of the Brady Arts District Business Association and the Brady Arts District Owners Association have acknowledged Tate Brady’s history and its overshadowing of the good things happening in the Brady Arts District now, and they insist it’s not their intention that anyone be hurt by the name of the district. The district’s name comes from the name of street, they argued before the City Council, and not the man.

Thursday evening, at the Tulsa City Council’s weekly meeting, members of the Coalition for Social Justice intend to call for the renaming of Brady Street, with the hope that then the district organizers, neighborhood association members, and theater owners will follow the leadership of the City Council..

According to Section 504 of Title 11 of the city charter, which pertains to street names, “The names of any streets opened or established shall be designated by the Director in conformity with the existing street naming system.” An aide to the Tulsa City Council described the process of passing an ordinance:

The actual ordinance changing the street name would need to be sponsored by a City Councilor… if approved by the City Council, the ordinance would go on to the Mayor for his approval or veto…. When a portion of Cincinnati was changed to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, the ordinance changing the name was approved on 6/9/11, but the Council was not able to allocate funding for the signage until 3/29/12.

The aide couldn’t estimate how much the changing of the name of Brady Street might cost, but she did say $85,000 was allocated to change the name of Cincinnati Avenue to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard from East Archer Street to East 66th Street North. In a district that has received over $25 million dollars in development in recent years, the cost of changing the Brady name seems insignificant. It’s also worth noting that the taxpayers of Tulsa give approximately $2 million each year to the Metro Chamber of Commerce for image marketing of Tulsa as part of the Chamber’s visitors and conventions efforts.

Other communities have dealt with this same issue. The University of Oklahoma changed the name of a building on its campus in the 1980s. Recently, the city of Memphis, Tennessee made the decision to change the names of three city parks, which had commemorated a Ku Klux Klan leader.

Tulsa is a city that has been divided by racism and is unique among American cities in that bigotry led to mass scale destruction, and even a “massacre” in some family minds. The city must now grapple with the fact that the Brady name is emblazoned across a section of the city that is viewed as leading a renaissance. For decades after the 1921 Race Riot, the city chose to deal with the repercussions by ignoring its history altogether. Now that reconciliation is part of its civic and cultural dialogue, Tulsa has an opportunity to perform reconciliation in action, or to stifle the community’s healing with inaction.

What it chooses to do will remain up to its people and leadership.

A faits divers is a short news item, usually about three lines; they’re often stories of strange murders or bizarre accidental deaths. The form originated in French newspapers, reaching its peak in Novels in Three Lines by Félix Fénéon; writers as diverse and eminent as Flaubert, Camus, and Barthes also worked in the medium. Recently, the American writer Teju Cole published on his Twitter account a series of faits divers(he called them “small fates”), inspired by the crime reports of his parents’ home country, Nigeria.

For this issue, here are fifteen Faits Divers based on stories in Morning Tulsa Daily World, from June 2, 3, and 4, 1921.

An old man disguised himself as a woman, dressing in his wife’s kimona, skirt, and hat, so he could escape a mob of whites.

—June 4, 1921

Dr. A.C. Jackson, one of the foremost surgeons in the southwest, was killed while running out of his house, which was on fire.

—June 2, 1921

Barney Cleaver, “negro deputy sheriff,” named Will Robinson, “dope peddler and all around bad negro,” as leader of the insurrectionists.

—June 3, 1921

“A strenuous day in many a Tulsa home” as society women found it necessary to cook their own meals for the first time in years.

—June 2, 1921

The Red Cross advised that “relatives of Tulsa negroes, other negroes” needed to stay away from town, until after the emergency.

—June 4, 1921

Walter Daggs was struck by a bullet in the back of the head while running down Boulder Avenue toward Seventh Street.

—June 2, 1921

C.B. Rogers, lawyer, argued before the board of control that every person of any color who joined in the rioting should have been killed.

—June 3, 1921

Reports from the ice companies indicate there is no danger of an ice famine, as most of the help employed is white.

—June 2, 1921

With so much to be done, and to prevent idleness and crime, Mayor Evans issued a “work or go to jail” order, to all the city’s menfolk.

—June 4, 1921

A faits divers is a short news item, usually about three lines; they’re often stories of strange murders or bizarre accidental deaths. The form originated in French newspapers, reaching its peak in Novels in Three Lines by Félix Fénéon; writers as diverse and eminent as Flaubert, Camus, and Barthes also worked in the medium. Recently, the American writer Teju Cole published on his Twitter account a series of faits divers(he called them “small fates”), inspired by the crime reports of his parents’ home country, Nigeria.

For this issue, here are fifteen Faits Divers based on stories in Morning Tulsa Daily World, from June 2, 3, and 4, 1921.

John Wheeler was killed on his way into work Wednesday morning. He was a porter at the First National Bank, and had been for over ten years.

—June 2, 1921

L.J. Martin, chairman of the board of control, said that as a result of the riot, Tulsa will be one of the best-governed cities in America.

—June 4, 1921

In Maple Ridge and Sunset Park, many women were imposed on to put out their own family’s wash.

—June 2, 1921

The registration of deeds was halted when authorities learned that whites were making lowball offers to owners of property in Little Africa.

—June 4, 1921

Homer Cline, aged 16, was shot twice through the stomach during the fighting on Tuesday night.

—June 2, 1921

At the Boston Avenue M.E. Church, both Reverend L.S. Barton (morning service), and Bishop E.D. Mouzon (evening), preached on the riot.

—June 4, 1921

Printed in This Land, Vol. 4, Issue 9. May 1, 2013.

It is normal that we look upon an event as tragic as the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 with a need for answers. We want to single out someone culpable. We look for some trigger to the destruction. Who could have caused the outbreak? Who tried to cover up its very existence? It’s part of human nature to need some villain, a despot we can abhor. And that’s where I come in.

I’m a fiction writer. Unlike an historian, I’m in the enviable position of being allowed to embellish history in such a way as to take something so widespread and pervasive as a societal malaise and funnel it through a small group of nefarious people we find easy to blame. To hate. Which is exactly what I did for my novel Water Darling.

I chose to expose the conditions of Tulsa in 1921 through several characters, both real and imaginary. When selecting real people for these roles, I researched the events extensively in order to shape my own viewpoint on their beliefs and personalities. My discoveries led me to personify certain common feelings of the time through these people. Men like Richard Lloyd Jones and O.B. Mann. And women like Sarah Page and Amy Comstock. In the pages of Water Darling, these real people breathe life. Not their true lives—the life I interpreted.

The easiest person for me to characterize in Water Darling as malevolent was Richard Lloyd Jones. Unlike most other people depicted in the novel, Jones was kind enough to publicly display his feelings through editorials and articles published in his newspaper, the Tulsa Tribune. There are numerous editorials, both before and after the riot, to suggest the self-righteous vitriol behind which I paint the man in my book. “Every unemployed man in town should be questioned, and if the answer should be unsatisfactory, should be ordered out of town.” [1] His claims about the all-black Greenwood District were equally saturated with the kind of shocking terms that endeared him to me as being a pivotal villain. Even ignoring the fact that his paper only referred to Greenwood as “Little Africa” or “Niggertown,” his consistent claims of its appalling conditions and being a den of sin and thievery guided my views on the man. He had obviously never been there. “A June 2 [1921] Tulsa Tribune editorial called the destruction of Greenwood ‘the angry white man’s reprisal for the wrong inflicted on them by the inferior race.’ Another Tribune story that week made light of black citizen’s plight. ‘There are white mourners in Tulsa as well as colored ones,’ it stated. ‘Nearly all who had their family washing in the destroyed Negro huts lost the clothes.’” [2]

In Water Darling I decided to paint the prideful O.B. Mann in an equally uncomplimentary light. In O.W. Gurley’s post-riot interview with the Tulsa Tribune—in and of itself suspect given the Tribune conducted the interview, and not to mention that Gurley and others likewise interviewed had financial interest in the outcome of the aftermath—Gurley stated, “But this boy [O.B. Mann] came back from France with exaggerated ideas about equality and thinking he can whip the world… they started the trouble and this fellow Mann fired the first shot.” [3] Other research I conducted also indicated O.B. Mann to have been in the middle of a great deal of the defense of Greenwood as well as the offensive forays to the Tulsa Courthouse where Dick Rowland was being held that night before the riot broke out.

The woman known as Sarah Page was not “an orphan who works as an elevator operator to pay her way through business college” as the Tribune article “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator” led the public to believe on May 31, 1921. My initial decision to portray her in Water Darling as a selfish, desperate woman came from my reading of The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 by Tim Madigan. In his book he stated, “She’d already been married and divorced. People said she had ditched her husband in Kansas City and come to Tulsa to live with a relative. Tulsa’s sheriff served divorce papers on her that spring and was heard to comment that if half of the charges in the divorce petition were true, ‘she was a notorious character.’ ” These kinds of views about her directed my thinking when I envisioned her plight and drafted how she would have acted under the circumstances.

My decision to portray Amy Comstock in Water Darling as a home wrecker and confidant of Richard Lloyd Jones came from two sources. The first was from research provided again by Tim Madigan, specifically in his chapter notes regarding “Woodard’s account of the scandal surrounding Jones and his affair with Amy Comstock… substantiated with transcripts of sworn legal depositions” (p 275). The second source was from her own words. In an article entitled “Over There—Another View of Tulsa” from The Survey in July 1921, Comstock wrote of the tragedy with the same kind of harshness that came out of Jones’ Tribune articles, with statements such as “it was in the sordid and neglected ‘Nigger-town’ that the crooks found their best hiding place. It was a cesspool of crime.” This article had all the typical earmarks of something Jones would write, which in my opinion felt like Amy Comstock was either aligned with Jones in her thinking, or had no alternative but to do as he said, fearful of her fate should she cross him. But knowing further that she had followed Jones to Tulsa from Wisconsin when Jones bought the Tribune gave me even more insight into her motives.

Large-scale events like the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 are never the act of a single person. Even as I wrote Water Darling, I knew that the chaos and lawlessness of the riot was something I needed to express so that the villains I created were merely taking advantage of events and not actually causing them individually. Combined, their actions were like cracks in a dam. The whole thing just suddenly burst open and all hell broke loose. No one man or woman was to blame.

Footnotes
1. Tulsa Tribune, December 23, 1920.
2. The American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal, Marian Moser Jones, p 185.
3. Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy, James S. Hirsch, pp 151-152

Printed in This Land, Vol. 4 Issue 9. May 1, 2013.

Persons of African ancestry, some enslaved, some free, lived among the Native American tribes who were forced to emigrate. The lives of these Africans and their Native American hosts became enmeshed.

Slaves owned by the tribes often felt multifaceted connections to their homes in Indian Territory, as evidenced by [those] who were fluent in tribal languages. They shared cultural and often family connections with their Indian owners, bonds that seem[ed] stronger than those of white-owned slaves and their masters. After the Civil War ended, former slaves of the Cherokees particularly expressed a connection to the Cherokee Nation in the Indian Territory. That was the only home many of these people had ever known, and they identified closely with the tribe.

Post-manumission, and after the collapse of Reconstruction in the late 1870s, still more persons of African ancestry migrated to Oklahoma. They sought escape from the stifling social, economic, and political conditions in the Deep South.

Eventually, white political leaders began a push to control the new Indian homeland. In 1878, leaders of the Five Civilized Tribes—P.P. Pitchlynn of the Choctaws; W.P. Adair and Daniel H. Ross of the Cherokees; John R. Moore, P. Porter, D.M. Hodge, and Yarteker Harjo of the Muscogee (Creek); John F. Brown and Thomas Cloud of the Seminoles; and B.F. Overton, governor of the Chickasaws—became concerned. They beseeched Congress to oppose measures that would: (1) open the land to white settlement; (2) extend United States legal jurisdiction to matters between and among Indians; (3) abolish tribal relations and grant United States citizenship to Indians; and (4) move Indians from a communal property system to a private property system.With arguable prescience, the tribal leaders asserted that the proposed actions would violate extant treaties and, if implemented, would ultimately devastate the Five Civilized Tribes. Their plea went unheeded.

By the late 1880s, whites, also seeking to escape harsh economic conditions in the East, moved west. These white settlers successfully pressured the federal government to open up for white settlement land that had been reserved for Native populations in Oklahoma. Before long, whites dominated Oklahoma in all spheres—social, economic, and political.

African Americans, Native Americans, and whites, seekers all, found their way to Oklahoma. Oklahoma promised opportunity—a fresh start; a new way of life. All three groups accepted her offer. For Native Americans, African Americans, and some European Americans, the story unraveled in the breach—the legacy of promises broken. Present reality cannot be separated from those initial bargains.

Native Americans yearned for sovereignty and a fresh start in a new land on the heels of forcible removal from their homelands in the southeastern United States. African Americans hoped to snare the full citizenship and economic parity denied them in the post-Reconstruction South. Whites, meanwhile, longed for a chance to fulfill their manifest destiny—to push forward with westward expansion and exploit newfound economic opportunities. As David A. Chang noted in his book on land ownership in early, pre-statehood Oklahoma:

‘Oklahoma’ means ‘red man’ in the Choctaw language, is run through by a ‘Black Belt,’ and has been claimed by some as ‘white man’s country.’It has been termed an Indian homeland, a black promised land, and a white heartland. All these competing racial claims to one place…reveal much about how the struggle over land has given shape to the way Americans—indigenous, black, and white—created and gave meaning to races and nations.

Fareedah Shayeb is ecstatic, like, that would be so amazing to represent my school like that, like, I love this school so much. Ron Padgett is not a hipster, though his ideas might be hipster-like in nature. John Brainard remembers his brother, Joe. Matt O’Meilia’s mom would kill him if he took that brownie. And Skating Polly makes a punk song about rainbows.

More in This Land:
“The White Dove Review” by Joshua Kline
“Leon’s Lair” by Matt O’Meilia
“White Dove Drive-Bys with Lee Roy Chapman”
“Driveway” by Ron Padgett
“Autobiography” by Joe Brainard
“The World is Yours: A Portrait of Joe Brainard” by Holly Wall
“She was the Punk of My Life” by Joshua Kline
“The Making of Miss Hornet” by John Waldron

Music:
“We’re Going to be Friends” by The White Stripes
“That Teenage Feeling” by Neko Case
“Oxygen Garden” by Chris Zabriskie
“Candlepower” by Chris Zabriskie
“Over and Under” by Antiphon
“Boulevard St. Germain” by Jahzzar
“Last Dance” by Jahzzar
“noir guitar” by Stevie’s Amp Shack
“PadRain” by Glass Boy + Courtenay Moon
“Intro” by Skating Polly
“Rainbows” by Skating Polly
“Don’t” by Skating Polly
“Lost Wonderfuls” by Skating Polly
“Kick” by Skating Polly

“By a show of hands, how many folks here tonight are Freedmen?” Cornsilk asked into the microphone. Each raised an arm. Visibly dismayed, Cornsilk shook his head. It was a trick question.

“No,” Cornsilk said. “The Freedmen died a long time ago. You are not Freedmen. You are Cherokee, and it is time that you begin to recognize who you are.”

Cornsilk is Cherokee, and a self-taught civil rights advocate and genealogist. He traces his slave-owning ancestors back to their aboriginal lands of Georgia and Tennessee—to a period before the Trail of Tears. Cornsilk is not a Cherokee Freedmen descendant. For nearly two decades, however, Cornsilk fought for the citizenship rights of Freedmen descendants—blacks who descend from slaves once owned by Cherokee and other tribes.

While working full-time as a clerk at Petsmart, Cornsilk took on America’s second-largest Indian tribe, the Cherokee Nation, in what led to a landmark tribal decision. Cornsilk served as a lay advocate, which permits non-lawyers to try cases before the Cherokee Nation’s highest court. When Cornsilk was not unloading dog food from truck beds and stocking shelves under the sounds of chirping parakeets, he composed legal briefs on the rights of Freedmen descendants, made oral arguments in court, and responded to a flurry of technical motions submitted by his opponents.

The legal advocacy would come at a personal cost for Cornsilk. Not long after his talk at Gilcrease Hills, he was unable to maintain two full-time jobs. So he sacrificed one. No sooner, Cornsilk failed to make rent on his one-bedroom apartment in Tulsa. He broke the lease and moved into his Honda Civic while seeking new employment. He began showering at the YMCA.

Outmatched and outspent by a team of Cherokee Nation lawyers, few considered Cornsilk a threat, and certainly not someone who could ignite debate on race and tribal power—but he did, and that debate would end up costing the Cherokee Nation millions of dollars in attorney’s fees, lobbyists, and public relations campaigns.

The ongoing battle for tribal equal rights for Freedmen descendants has grown increasingly urgent. With other American Indian tribes across Oklahoma closely watching the impending U.S. court cases to signal the fate of their own Freedmen descendants and the extent of their sovereignty, Cornsilk believes that the present stakes could not be higher.

Not surprisingly, Cornsilk has grown more polemical. At the Baptist church Cornsilk said that if you do not think these folks in this room “have Cherokee ancestry and you have not done the research to find out, then you’re a racist.” Part of what helps make him so compelling is that on the surface—like Cherokee Principal Chief Bill John Baker and members of the Cherokee Nation Tribal Council—Cornsilk looks white.

Kenneth Payton, a descendant of Cherokee freedmen, searches his ancestry with Gene Norris, senior genealogist at the Cherokee Heritage Center.
Images by Sam Russell. Courtesy of FREEDMEN, the documentary film.

Oppressed by the Oppressed

Headquartered in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the Cherokee Nation and its wholly owned business arm earned over a billion dollars last year through a myriad of businesses such as gaming, U.S. Department of Defense contracts, and federally funded programs. Today, taxpayers help support the Cherokee Nation through federal grants.

The brutality committed by whites against American Indians—especially the Trail of Tears—has become a part of our national conscience. Yet it is hard to imagine that during this period an even more poorly documented atrocity was being perpetrated: The Cherokee were slave owners long before their forced removal from the southern states.

By the time gold was discovered in Georgia at the dawn of the 19th century, Cherokee slave codes were indistinguishable from those enacted by the rest of the South. Soon after, when the U.S. Indian Removal Act forced Cherokee and other Indians to relinquish their native land and move west, countless blacks enslaved by Cherokees crossed into the frontier bound and shackled. These black slaves suffered a far more violent experience than their Indian masters.

Nearly a third of the Cherokee Nation’s citizens lost their lives during the Trail of Tears; the number of their slaves killed remains unknown. Once the Cherokee Nation arrived in what later became Oklahoma, they prospered in part due to their agrarian roots, large-scale plantations, and practice of slavery.

Three decades later, when the Lincoln administration threatened slaveholders, the Cherokee Nation signed allegiance with the Confederacy. Finding themselves on the losing side of the Civil War, and their shrinking territory under threat once again, the Cherokee Nation sought to re-establish government-to-government relations with the US.

In the summer of 1866, just months after U.S. lawmakers amended the Constitution to bar slavery, the Cherokee Nation entered into a treaty with the federal government. Among a long list of terms, the treaty granted perpetual freedom and full tribal membership to Cherokee slaves and their descendants. The Treaty of 1866 named these black, newly minted Cherokee members “Freedmen.”

Kenneth Payton, a descendant of Cherokee Freedmen. Image by Sam Russell.

Freedmen and Tribal Benefits

From the last row of Gilcrease Hills Baptist Church’s recreation hall, Kenneth Payton listened to David Cornsilk’s voice rise and fall. Payton looks like a professional basketball player. He is six foot five, wears a tracksuit, and drives a pick-up. Payton lives in Broken Arrow with his wife and three of his four boys. His young sons append the word “sir” to their responses, hinting at their father’s service in the United States Army. When we first met, Payton’s hand enveloped mine.

Once the Cherokee Nation arrived in what later became Oklahoma, they prospered in part due to their agrarian roots, large-scale plantations, and practice of slavery.

Payton and other Freedmen descendants are represented in the pending U.S. court case by Jon Velie, who is a licensed attorney based in Norman. Velie describes Payton as a “Cherokee of African descent.”The unfolding lawsuit led by Velie challenges the Cherokee Nation’s dismissal of its former black citizens. “It’s not a damages case,” Velie said.“The Freedmen citizens simply want to be reinstated as full members of the tribe.”

The ongoing litigation demands that the federal government enforce the 147-year-old treaty between the United States and Cherokee Nation, and restore tribal citizenship to Payton, his children, and potentially, tens of thousands of others who share similar ancestry. “I tell my kids all the time, ‘You are Cherokee,’ ” Payton said. “And they say, ‘Oh Dad, he is crazy,’ but it is true. We are Cherokee.”

Payton is not alone. During the year I spent reporting this story, nearly everyone I met in Oklahoma claimed Indian heritage. To many, the notion that Indian blood pumps through them, irrespective of quantum or degree, is a birthright. It suggests a dual identity. And it insinuates indigenous roots—a deeper, more authentic tie to land and country that predates statehood and union. But unlike most, Payton possesses the documents to back his claims.

After a rare public debate between Jon Velie and the Cherokee Nation’s Attorney General Todd Hembree, a young man stood to ask a question. Until this moment, the debate on Freedmen held at the University of Oklahoma School of Law had been pointed, though relatively cordial. An event organizer rushed to furnish the young Indian a wireless microphone. “What I do not understand is, what is it that these people want?” the young man demanded, directing his questions about the Freedmen at Velie. His voice did not require amplification. “What do they actually want? Or as my parents and grandparents would say, Gado usdi unaduli?”

I later learned that the young man’s name is Corey Still. He was a senior at the University of Oklahoma, and a full-blood Cherokee. Addressing Velie and the audience in his native Cherokee tongue was laced in subtext. If anyone else in the auditorium spoke Cherokee, including Freedmen descendants, it was not apparent. Cherokee Nation Attorney General Hembree has long argued that because his tribe is an independent sovereign with a distinct culture, it has an absolute right to self-determine its criteria for citizenship. Corey Still struck at the heart of a different, more veiled, but no less present sentiment.

To Payton and other Freedmen descendants, their ongoing lawsuit is about acceptance. Payton seeks on behalf of his family, living and dead, recognition of his tribal identity. But implicit in the enforcement of a century-old treaty—and this is what Corey Still was alluding to—are the present-day benefits that come with tribal citizenship: free health care, educational scholarships, and housing assistance, to name a few. In Indian country, the idea that black “non-Indians” are unjustly suing tribes solely for economic benefits has been the source of much racially charged vitriol.

Several months after the debate, clutching his birth certificate and grandparents’ death certificates, Payton drove his pick-up from Broken Arrow to Tahlequah. Dense woods conceal the Cherokee Heritage Center’s genealogy center, which offers free services to would-be Cherokee. Gene Norris, the center’s senior genealogist, told Payton that Cherokee citizenship is determined by linking an ancestor to the federal Dawes Rolls, which were completed in 1907. Norris inspected the authenticity of Payton’s paperwork, led Payton to a computer, and searched for Payton’s relatives on a digitized version of the rolls.

“Here’s Emma,” Norris said. Norris discovered Emma Mackee, Payton’s great-grandmother, listed on the rolls. He then attempted to explain that there are subsections to the rolls. They include “By Blood” and “Freedmen,” among others. The nuance left Payton scratching his shaved head. Your great-grandmother is on the Freedmen subsection, Norris explained, adding that until the litigation is resolved, the Cherokee Nation is not accepting any Freedmen applications for citizenship.

“You can go ahead and apply but they probably won’t process it,” Norris said.

Cherokee Nation Holiday Parade, September, 2012. Image by Sam Russell.

Indian Blood

For hundreds of years, the question of who is an Indian has vexed the federal government and tribes alike. By the end of the 19th century, being an Indian usually came with one of two things: benefit or despair. More often, it came with both at once. Tribal economic benefits encouraged fraudulent citizenship claims by white, non-Indian imposters. Despair drove many true Indians away from federal officials.

Up until 1893, the dozens of tribes residing in Indian Territory owned millions of acres communally. The Cherokee Nation was the largest and most powerful tribe among them. Cloaked under efforts to assimilate Indians into American society and usher greater economic opportunity, in 1887, the federal government passed a law that began negotiations to chop up tribal lands. A federal commission was later organized and tasked with persuading the Cherokee Nation and other major tribes—known as the Five Civilized Tribes—to carve their land into allotments that could be bought and sold. The man appointed to lead the commission was a former abolitionist Massachusetts Senator named Henry Dawes.

On November 28, 1893, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Hoke Smith [1] issued instructions to Dawes and other commission members. The contents of that letter, according to Kent Carter, author of The Dawes Commission and the Allotment of the Five Civilized Tribes, were not made public at the time.

“What I do not understand is, what is it that these people want?” the young man demanded.

“Success in your negotiations will mean the total abolition of the tribal autonomy of the Five Civilized Tribes and the wiping out the quasi-independent governments within our territorial limits,” Smith wrote to Dawes. The feds were making way for the 46th state: Oklahoma, which derives from Choctaw words, “okla” and “huma,” or “red” and “people.”

Tribes “absolutely decided to take a united front and oppose the allotment of their land and the termination of tribal governments,” Dr. Brad Agnew, a history professor at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, said. After multiple attempts, Dawes failed to convince leaders of the Cherokee Nation to split and relinquish their lands. Congress responded by passing another law. In 1898—just a a year after the region’s first commercial oil well was drilled [2]—a new federal law effectively forced the Cherokee Nation and other tribes into submission. The plan: Each Indian citizen or head of household would be granted over a hundred acres. Before the land could be divided, Dawes and his commission had to answer: Who is an Indian?

The challenge was further complicated by internal tribal factions, which were a consequence of removal. Over time, many white colonialists had married into the tribe, and their light-skinned descendants often ascended to positions of power. “If you look at pictures of the leaders of the Cherokee Nation, most of them, they dressed white, they looked white,” Professor Agnew said. “They were white for all intents and purposes.” Principal Chief John Ross, for instance, who led the Cherokee Nation from 1828 until his death in 1866, was seven-eighths Scottish. [3]

While the Dawes Rolls were finalized, a succession of new oil wells sprouted across the region. Railroad systems linking east and west coasts that had once been obstructed by Indian reservations were either fully connected or on the way to becoming so. During his final years, Senator Dawes, who had once been viewed as a friend to American Indians, was plagued by sickness. He died in 1903. His colleagues helped finish what historians agree was a herculean task.

The federal Dawes Rolls of the Five Civilized Tribes closed on March 5, 1907, superseding all previous Indian citizenship rolls. Seven months later, tribal jurisdictions crumbled. Borders of what had been Oklahoma Territory were expanded and redrawn. Oklahoma became a state on November 16, 1907. At its birth, Oklahoma was the leading oil-producing state in the U.S. It would maintain that distinction until 1921—the same year, it turns out, Oklahoma’s Adair county would earn two distinctions of its own: highest concentration of Cherokee full-blood residents, and poorest county in the nation.

Cherokee Nation Holiday Parade, September, 2012
Image by Sam Russell.

State of the Nation

During Labor Day weekend of 2012, as most Americans relished the final days of summer, the Cherokee Nation erupted in celebration. The festivities marked the commemoration of the signing of the Cherokee Tribal Constitution. On Friday night, a powwow commenced the weekend’s events. Beads of sweat streamed down faces masked in paint. Full-blood Cherokees cloaked in tribal regalia—brightly colored feathered headdresses, leather leggings, and beaded dresses—howled and chanted and struck communal drums. Hundreds danced to the throbbing beats. Cherokee folklore says that the pounding of drums embody the tribe’s pulsing heart and enduring fire.

For three days, over the course of dozens of dizzying events, despite a dogged heat, potent displays of tribal nationalism did not subside. “Once that fire dies down, then that’s when all the tribes will die down,” a young Cherokee said,“and it is our job to pass it from generation to generation.” If the federal government had attempted to wipe out the Cherokee Nation, they had done so in vain. Bill John Baker, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, who has a shock of white hair, spent the long weekend promoting a message of tribal unification. He seemed to emerge magically at each event, serving as master of ceremonies. “We all come from one fire,” Chief Baker said.

“They welcomed us. It was quite unusual,” he said. “The way they looked at us and clapped, it was like, ‘Glad y’all here. You made it.”

To Rodslen Brown-King, a Freedmen descendant, Chief Baker’s message stood in contrast to his actions— or lack there of—upon entering office. Cherokee people, she says, derive from “one fire,” but it is the inclusion of the Freedmen in that metaphor where her interpretation diverges from the chief ’s.The morning after the powwow, Brown-King, her three brothers, eight sisters, two sons, two daughters, and ten grandchildren, displayed their own message of tribal unification—not in a courtroom but in the Cherokee Holiday Parade. Just after dawn on Saturday, Brown-King and her family applied final touches to their Freedmen parade float, which included an eight-foot working waterfall. Before the parade began, sidewalks lining Tahlequah’s Muskogee Avenue were littered with lawn chairs and young families eager to secure good views.

Between floats, sirens wailed as local fireman crammed in buzzing go-carts spun in circles. A college marching band honked freshly polished golden horns. As the army of floats drifted down the street, it grew increasingly apparent that nearly everyone—both parade participants and bystanders packing the streets—looked the same: white. The full-blood Cherokee who had starred at the powwow the night before had all but vanished. Save for Rodslen Brown-King and her family, no other blacks were in sight. So when they were finally directed by tribal officials to pull their oversized pick-up truck into the parade line, it was not just the extravagance of their float that drew attention.

Rodslen, who is in her late 40s, fit, and has long, locked hair, jogged alongside the Freedmen float. She waved and tossed candies to the small children dotting the street. As the Freedmen float rolled by, an elderly white woman seated in a canvas chair rocked her head back and forth in apparent disgust. The overwhelming majority of those in attendance, however, cheered Rodslen and her family along. Most agreed that the Freedmen float was impressive. Willoman Brown, Jr., Rodslen’s son, gazed at onlookers as he steered the pick-up pulling the float with one hand on the wheel and an elbow fixed on the window ledge. “They welcomed us. It was quite unusual,” he said. “The way they looked at us and clapped, it was like, ‘Glad y’all here. You made it.’ ”

Several hours after the parade, on the other side of town, Chief Baker delivered his State of the Nation address to a large, air-conditioned auditorium. More than once, he was overcome by emotion. While discussing his efforts to bridge a divided Cherokee Nation, Chief Baker choked up. He was forced to pause until the threat of his own tears subsided. U.S. Congressman Tom Cole and Baker’s cabinet, including Attorney General Todd Hemebree, along with members of the Cherokee Nation Tribal Council, crowded the first rows. Baker’s predecessor, Chief Chad Smith, who led the Cherokee Nation for 12 years—and oversaw a tribal constitutional amendment that removed Freedmen descendants—did not attend. During last year’s highly contested tribal election, Smith lost to Baker by a sliver of votes.

Chief Baker did not mention the Freedmen descendants, or how their ongoing litigation bled into the election he ultimately won. Baker did not bring up or explain why, just a year earlier, the federal government turned off a faucet flowing millions of dollars to the Cherokee Nation. And he did not mention the costs— both to the Cherokee Nation’s coffers and reputation—of maintaining the fight to keep Kenneth Payton, Rodslen Brown-King, and thousands more Freedmen descendants out of the tribe.

The exclusion of the Freedmen in Chief Baker’s State of the Nation speech reflects the chasm between how the tribe perceives itself internally and how outsiders perceive it. For a tribe that has fallen victim to unspeakable crimes historically, it is difficult to accept its own original sin. “We never held slaves,” an elderly full-blood Cherokee told me after the speech. [4] Perhaps the reason Chief Baker passed over the Freedmen is because so few members of the tribe acknowledge their own stained history, let alone recent events that shaped the Freedmen dissension. Advocates say that much of what occurred in the Freedmen case took place in secret, or as a tribal judge put it, “through silence.”

The 2007 constitutional amendment that permanently removed the Freedmen descendants, even Attorney General Hembree concedes, was done in haste. In that special election, which clenched the disenfranchisement of Freedmen descendants, less than seven percent of the tribe cast votes. The Freedmen descendants are easy to ignore. They make up a minority of the tribe. But like African Americans in state and national elections, Freedmen descendants might constitute a powerful block. After more than a century maintaining tribal voting rights, it was this threat—the fear that the Freedmen descendants may band together to unseat an incumbent chief—that first led to their ouster.The extent of their unwillingness to go quietly was impossible to foresee. So too was the resolve of their advocates.

David Cornsilk addresses freedmen descendants at Gilcrease Hills Baptist Church in northwest Tulsa Image by Sam Russell.

The Rise of David Cornsilk

The two men met while standing beside each other under a blistering sun. The line to vote for the next Cherokee Principal Chief snaked around the courthouse. The man who would later reach the voter registration table first was elderly, smallish, and appeared black. The man who stood directly behind him was young, tall, and appeared white. It was 1983—a century after the Dawes Commission was established. As the line inched forward, the two men struck up a conversation on tribal politics and Oklahoma’s relentless heat. The black man introduced himself as Roger Nero. The white man introduced himself as David Cornsilk.

When Nero reached the registration table, a light- skinned Cherokee woman requested to see Nero’s tribal identification card. “ ‘We don’t let you people vote anymore,’ ” Cornsilk recalled the tribal official saying to Nero. The official instructed Nero to vacate the building. “When I handed her my card, she smiled and said no problem and handed me a ballot,” Cornsilk said. Cornsilk did not discover until after the election that Nero was a Freedmen descendant. At the time, Nero was 82. He was an infant during Oklahoma statehood; Nero’s name appears on the original Dawes Rolls.

“Part of my job was to deal with Freedmen applicants,” Cornsilk said. “I started reading their histories, and I came to the realization that we really screwed these people.”

Nero filed a lawsuit against the tribe in U.S. courts. The court dismissed the suit and ruled that Nero’s case was a tribal matter. “He was old and didn’t have any money and pretty much let it go,”Cornsilk said. Nero’s failure to gather traction and his subsequent death haunted Cornsilk, who later landed a position within the Cherokee Nation’s department of tribal registration. “Part of my job was to deal with Freedmen applicants,” Cornsilk said. “I started reading their histories, and I came to the realization that we really screwed these people.”

During the two decades that followed, Cornsilk advocated for the rights of Freedmen descendants with mixed results. In 1988, while still a tribal employee, he wrote a letter of protest on behalf of Freedmen—garnering the support of six additional tribal employees who signed in solidarity—and sent it to then-Principal Chief Wilma Mankiller. Cornsilk told me that his letter resulted in threats by senior tribal officials. “I never heard from the chief, but I got a call from the chief ’s aide who said, ‘We do not talk about the Freedmen, and anyone who does, does not work for the tribe.’ ” Tribal officials deny these claims.

After a decade of advocating for the Freedmen while still a tribal employee, Cornsilk grew disenchanted by tribal leadership. He quit working for the tribe, and after a quick stint working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., Cornsilk returned to Tahlequah to begin his work as an official “lay advocate.” After an elderly black woman named Bernice Riggs was denied Cherokee citizenship by the tribe, Cornsilk obtained permission from the Cherokee tribal court to petition an appeal on her behalf. Cornsilk said that Cherokee tribal members told him that Riggs lived on “Nigger Hill,” a neighborhood outside Tahlequah where many Freedmen descendants reside. The Riggs case was not successful, yet it solidified Cornsilk as an unwavering Freedmen advocate.

With a receding hairline and newly separated from his full-blood Cherokee wife, Cornsilk moved to Tulsa in 2000 and accepted a full-time clerk position at Petsmart. While working there in the summer of 2003, Cornsilk received a phone call from Marilyn Vann, an engineer by trade, and leader of the Freedmen Descendants of the Five Civilized Tribes. Jon Velie, the Norman-based attorney, represents Vann.

After helping to bring legal action against the Seminole Nation several years earlier, Velie earned a reputation as a civil rights attorney. [5] In 2000, the Seminole Nation, which is smaller than the Cherokee Nation and based in Wewoka, stripped their Freedmen descendants of citizenship rights with a tribal constitutional amendment. Velie was part of the legal team that secured a federal court decision in favor of Seminole Freedmen. Now, with Velie on the Cherokee Freedmen case pro bono, he and Vann were preparing a legal offensive against the Cherokee Nation.

Vann called Cornsilk and invited him to address a Freedmen descendants’ meeting in north Tulsa. Vann believed that Cornsilk understood the Freedmen plight as well as anyone. “He knew a great deal about Cherokee law and history and genealogy,” Vann said.

To Vann and other Freedmen advocates, the summer of 2003 brought with it a great sense of urgency. Principal Chief Chad Smith, who was first elected to the tribe’s highest office in 1999, had just clinched his second term. According to Cornsilk, designating Cherokee Freedmen as “non-Indians” was a priority throughout Smith’s first term. That May, Cherokee Freedmen descendants were excluded from the general election that secured Smith’s second term.

But there was something else at stake during the 2003 general tribal election to which the Freedmen were not a party. Smith had run in part on a platform to remove federal oversight of the Cherokee Nation. At the time, the Cherokee Constitution required approval of new tribal amendments by the Secretary of the Interior—the head of the same federal agency that attempted to wipe out the Cherokee Nation’s government. The 2003 general election included a tribal constitutional referendum. Smith’s administration presented Cherokee citizens with an opportunity to vote to approve a tribal amendment removing federal approval of future amendments. To fellow Cherokee, it was an easy sell. If American Indian tribes are truly sovereign, what business is it of the U.S. government to approve their constitutional amendments?

But Smith still needed federal approval for such an amendment. That May, in addition to voting for Chief Smith, the majority of Cherokee citizens— excluding the Freedmen—had just voted in favor of the constitutional amendment. This was not enough to win over Department of Interior officials. Senior members within that federal agency realized the implications of approving such a measure—one that would forever forfeit their veto power over changes to the Cherokee tribal constitution. That same summer, the Department of Interior received alarming letters from Jon Velie; he warned of legal action should the Department of Interior fail to “honor its treaty obligations,” and enforce the voting and citizenship rights of Cherokee Freedmen descendants.

 If American Indian tribes are truly sovereign, what business is it of the federal government to approve their constitutional amendments?

The feds were now apprehensive. They worried that approving the amendment to remove oversight of future amendments would equip the Cherokee Nation—much like the Seminole Nation had a few years earlier—with the legal framework to turn around and remove their Freedmen by constitutional amendment. [6] Still, there were deeper tensions at play. After centuries of federal encroachment over tribal affairs, the Department of Interior labored to implement a policy that provided greater sovereign power to tribes, not less. The feds sought to strike a balance between providing more autonomy to Indian Nations and protecting the civil rights of Freedmen descendants. It was a tenuous balance at best.

In a letter to Chief Smith, Neal McCaleb, assistant secretary of the Department of Interior at the time, expressed the federal government’s willingness to approve the amendment under the following conditions:

All members of the Cherokee Nation, including the Freedman descendants who are otherwise qualified, must be provided an equal opportunity to vote in the election. Second, under current law, no amendment to the Nation’s Constitution can eliminate the Freedmen from membership in the Nation absent Congressional authorization.

While serving as Cherokee Nation Principal Chief, and after he was defeated in 2011 by challenger, Bill John Baker, Chad Smith refused multiple requests to be interviewed for this story. [7] An examination of the letters he wrote over the last decade, court documents, and his speeches illustrate that Smith’s stance toward Cherokee Freedmen descendants is unambiguous. In response to the Department of Interior’s letter, Smith assured the federal government that citizenship rights would not be affected by the tribal constitutional amendment. Smith responded to Department of Interior:

Nothing in the pending Constitutional Amendment will substantively alter in any manner whatsoever existing rules under the 1976 Constitution governing citizenship in the Cherokee Nation.

Smith was not being disingenuous, but he was not being forthcoming either. Though he did not say so at the time, Smith had always held the position that it was the original intention of 1976 Tribal Constitution— the most recently ratified Cherokee constitution at the time—to remove Freedmen citizenship. Smith, who was a trained lawyer and had recently spent a semester teaching Indian law at Dartmouth College, kept quiet on the issue. The Cherokee Nation’s highest court would later disagree with Smith’s interpretation.

In May 2003, the Cherokee Nation held its tribal elections. The tribal constitutional amendment to remove federal approval of future tribal amendments was placed on the ballot. The majority of the Cherokee Nation’s citizens voted in favor of the amendment. Also, Chief Smith was elected to his second term in office. The Cherokee Freedmen, however, were not permitted to vote in this election.

That summer, the Department of Interior, Jon Velie, and Chief Smith exchanged a flurry of letters.To Smith, the controversy over the tribal citizenship rights for Freedmen descendants was an internal tribal issue. At stake was the Cherokee Nation’s right to self-determination. When the Department of Interior officials directly questioned Smith’s interpretation of the tribal constitution, and expressed reluctance to approve the tribal amendment removing its federal veto powers, Smith’s tone grew more antagonistic. Smith wrote back to the Department of Interior:

In the age of self-determination and self-governance, I am shocked to find the contents and tone of your letter to be both patronizing and very paternalistic. It appears that some officials in your department desire to re- turn to the era of “bureaucratic imperialism.”. . . It is a fact that the Cherokee people have decided their leadership and approved a constitutional amendment on May 24, 2003, by a democratic process in accordance with Cherokee Law.

Velie saw it differently. [8] However, the Department of Interior ultimately caved. Near summer’s end in 2003, the Department of Interior formally recognized Smith as Chief of the Cherokee Nation for his second term—despite the Freedmen’s exclusion at the polls. They did not, however, approve the tribal amendment removing federal approval of future tribal amendments. Nevertheless, on August 11, 2003, on behalf of Marilyn Vann, Kenneth Payton, Rodslen Brown-King, and other Freedmen descendants, Jon Velie filed a lawsuit in District Court against the Secretary of Interior, claiming that Smith was elected as chief without the Freedmen vote, in violation of the 1866 Treaty.

Cornsilk, paradoxically, was not pleased to learn about the lawsuit. Make no mistake, Cornsilk was vehemently opposed to the Cherokee Nation’s exclusion of their Freedmen. But it is difficult to overstate just how deeply Cornsilk’s Cherokee nationalistic sentiments run. Cornsilk was—and generally remains—against involving the federal government in tribal affairs. Velie’s maneuvering, meanwhile, was strategic. Velie did not file suit directly against the Cherokee Nation. Such an approach, as the Nero case illustrated, risked early dismissal. Instead, Velie filed suit against the Department of Interior in an attempt to compel the federal agency to enforce treaty obligations over the Cherokee Nation. But to Cornsilk, the Cherokee Nation had been betrayed by federal government too many times to justify their present-day involvement.

 

Jon Velie, attorney who represents the Cherokee and Seminole freedmen
Image by Sam Russell.

When Cornsilk received the call and invitation from Vann to address the Freedmen descendants, he appeared after a day’s work at Petsmart.The meeting took place at the Rudisill Regional Library, located in a predominately black neighborhood in north Tulsa, though within Cherokee Nation boundaries. “This woman stands up and talks about how she was mistreated by the Cherokee Nation,” Cornsilk said. She said that Cherokee Nation officials had abused her because she appears black. The woman speaking was clad in formal dress and an old-fashioned hat. Her name is Lucy Allen. Cornsilk then stood up and addressed the room. He spoke of Roger Nero and Bernice Riggs. He also expressed his contempt for Chief Smith and his removal of the Freedmen. After the meeting, Lucy Allen pulled Cornsilk aside. Allen asked Cornsilk what could be done to combat Chief Smith.

“Let’s sue,” Cornsilk told Allen. Of course, he was talking about tribal court.

“I don’t know what came over me. I was overcome with emotion, and concern for her, the Freedmen, and the future of my tribe,” Cornsilk said.

It took nearly a year for his Petsmart colleagues to realize that Cornsilk was actively litigating on behalf of Lucy Allen and Cherokee Freedmen descendants outside of work hours.

“Whenever I had free time, I worked on the Freedmen case,” Cornsilk said. At first, Cornsilk did not own a computer. He ended up purchasing one after securing a line of credit with Dell. He named his personal computer “Cherokee War Machine.”

Early attempts by Cornsilk’s opponents to dismiss the tribal case on various technicalities were unsuccessful. At least two out of the three tribal judges did not wish to see a tribal constitutional case dismissed on anything but the case’s merits. “I would say that I didn’t have a personal life,” Cornsilk said. “My life was the case.”

Cornsilk was a registered tribal lay advocate, working on behalf of Lucy Allen, so the majority of the court awarded Cornsilk a wide breadth of latitude—similar to one who represents oneself in court.

“I didn’t try to twist anything or dazzle anyone with fancy words,” Cornsilk said.

As Cornsilk pushed through early stages of the case, the Department of Interior took notice, as did the Justice Department. Cornsilk’s tribal court case threatened Velie’s ongoing litigation in the U.S. court system. The two cases more or less concerned the same issue. Through the lens of outsiders, Cornsilk’s lawsuit supplied credence and legitimacy to Cherokee Nation tribal courts. [9]

As Cornsilk pushed through early stages of the case, the Department of Interior took notice.

Velie realized that Cornsilk’s tribal suit supplied new ammunition for Smith’s response to the feds. Smith had always argued that the Cherokee Nation had its own court system intact. In letters and briefs filed by the Cherokee Nation seeking early dismissal of Velie’s suit, Smith often cited the older Nero case. Smith and his administration argued that the proper venue for the Freedmen grievances was indeed in tribal court. And no sooner did Cornsilk bring the Lucy Allen petition forward did Velie urge Cornsilk to drop the case. There was too much at stake. Also, as Cornsilk began litigating in tribal court, more obvious risks emerged. Cornsilk worked at Petsmart. What could he possibly know about tribal law? If Cornsilk lost—and most experts expected him to do so—it could thwart success of future litigation. What’s more, Chief Smith had appointed the majority of tribal judges to the Cherokee Nation’s highest court. Few expected Cornsilk to prevail.

And then there was the issue of Cornsilk’s opponents. Cornsilk’s preliminary research led him to believe that his best tactic was to file the Lucy Allen lawsuit against the Cherokee Nation Tribal Council, which functions as the tribe’s legislative body. Cornsilk argued that the new Cherokee Nation requirement that determined tribal citizenship link to the “by blood” subsection of the Dawes Rolls was extra-constitutional, and therefore unconstitutional. At the time, one of the tribal council’s longtime members—with greater political ambitions—was Bill John Baker. The tribal council selected their attorney to defend Cornsilk’s petition: a young rising Cherokee Nation tribal lawyer, Todd Hembree.

Velie was correct to worry about Cornsilk’s tribal court filing. It would emerge later in a congressional investigation that the feds perceived the Cherokee Freedmen differently than the Seminole Freedmen case. In the Seminole case, Jon Velie’s legal team had already convinced the federal government to force the Seminole Nation to reinstate citizenship rights to its Freedmen descendants, or forfeit federal funding, and with it, a license to operate lucrative casinos. The Department of Interior later told members of Congress that they involved themselves in the Seminole Freedmen case because, unlike the Cherokee Nation, the Seminole Nation did not have an adequate tribal court system in place. The Cherokee Nation did, and as the tribal case dragged on, Cornsilk helped prove it.

As Cornsilk’s case reached its final stages, Hembree and Cornsilk filed motions almost daily.

“I threw everything in except the kitchen sink,” Cornsilk said.

On March 7, 2006, nine months after Cornsilk’s closing arguments, a tribal court clerk placed a call to Petsmart. One of Cornsilk’s colleagues paged him over the loudspeaker. Cornsilk was unloading dog food from a truck bed out back and missed the page. The colleague tracked down Cornsilk and informed him that he had a call. When Cornsilk lifted the phone, Lisa Fields, the court clerk asked Cornsilk if he was sitting down.

“No,” Cornsilk replied. “Should I be?’”

“You won,” she told him. “You won the Freedmen lawsuit.”

“My knees got weak and I felt myself get faint,” he recalled.

Cornsilk asked Fields to fax over the decision. Petsmart staff packed around the office watching the fax machine spit out pages.

“They were like, ‘There’s another one,’ ” he said. “Everything I had done: writing the letter to Wilma Mankiller, standing there with Nero, everything flashed before my eyes.”

Petsmart later promoted Cornsilk to assistant manager.

Todd Hembree, Cherokee Nation Attorney General debating against jon Velie
Image by Sam Russell.

Bending the Will of a People

The day after David Cornsilk defeated Hembree in tribal court, he received a congratulatory call from an official at the U.S. Justice Department. Two weeks later, Chief Smith issued a memorandum to the Cherokee Nation registrar:

“With no requirement for proof of Cherokee blood, certain Registration procedures must necessarily be adjusted accordingly,” Smith wrote. “Applications from prospective citizens without Cherokee blood are to be processed on the same basis as all other applications for citizenship.”

In light of the Lucy Allen decision, Smith instructed senior tribal leaders to revise forms, brochures, and to inform other staff of the implications of the tribal court’s decision. “I thought it was over,” Cornsilk said, “but I underestimated the racism of Chad Smith.” In a letter Smith would later write to members of Congress, he denied that the following events were motivated by racial prejudice.

Cornsilk’s victory, however, was accompanied by a curious opinion. Stacy Leeds, then a Cherokee tribal court justice, wrote the majority decision, the precise wording of which armed Smith’s administration and their supporters with new leverage. Leeds narrowly wrote that there is no “clear language in the 1976 Cherokee Constitution to exclude the Freedman from citizenship.” However, Leeds also noted that the Cherokee citizenry has the ultimate authority to define tribal citizenship, but they “must do so expressly:”

If the Cherokee people wish to limit tribal citizenship, and such limitation would terminate the pre-existing citizenship of even one Cherokee citizen, then it must be done in the open. It cannot be accomplished through silence

It was around these few sentences that Smith and his supporters would stage a new strategy. Smith proposed passing a tribal constitutional amendment on Freedmen citizenship through public referendum. This presented a chance, Smith claimed, for Cherokee citizens to vote—in the open—to overturn the result of the tribal court’s decision.

“The issue at hand is what classes [10] of people should be citizens of the Cherokee Nation, and who should make that decision, the courts or the Cherokee people themselves,” Smith said during his 2006 State of the Nation address, after the Allen decision. “The process to decide the issue of Freedmen citizenship is a constitutional amendment at the polls.”

With another election for Principal Chief looming, Smith faced an important year. Smith’s third-term as Principal Chief was at stake, and he and his supporters acted swiftly. Almost immediately after the tribal court decision, Smiths’ supporters and anti-Freedmen advocates advanced a tribal petition. Their goal was to garner enough signatures to bring forth a referendum at the polls. Cornsilk countered by launching an aggressive campaign to register new Freedmen. As a result of Cornsilk’s tribal court win, Cherokee citizenship rights had been restored to Freedmen descendants. Cornsilk and Vann’s efforts helped secure Cherokee citizenship to about 2,800 Freedmen descendants. Though they didn’t know it at the time, the window for Freedmen descendants to apply for tribal citizenship was closing.

When Cornsilk lifted the phone, Lisa Fields, the Court Clerk asked Cornsilk if he was sitting down.

Velie contends that after the Allen decision, Smith and his administration set out to increase the size of the Cherokee Nation’s then-highest court. The Allen case had been decided by three judges in a 2-to-1 decision, with Stacy Leeds writing for the majority. After the Allen decision, Smith appointed two new members to the court and renamed it: The Cherokee Supreme Court. During a rare public debate, Velie said that Smith intentionally “dismantled the court” to exert tighter control over its decisions. Smith interrupted Velie’s allotted time to say, “That’s not true.” Stacy Leeds contends that court expansion plans were set in motion before Smith became chief. Leeds said that the court’s expansion had no correlation to the Freedmen issue. Nevertheless, the court’s expansion would play a critical role in a lawsuit Cornsilk would file next.

In late 2006, David Cornsilk, Marilyn Vann, and other volunteers began inspecting various signatures gathered by petition leaders. Cornsilk and Vann discovered inconsistencies, and what they believed were fraudulent signatories. Cornsilk once more filed suit in tribal court challenging the authenticity of the various petitions. The recently expanded tribal court invalidated some signatures, but overall ruled against Cornsilk. Stacy Leeds, in this case, wrote a lone dissenting opinion calling the petition glaringly fraudulent.

That December, Stacy Leeds’s term as tribal justice expired.Chief Smith did not appoint her to an additional term. In January 2007, Leeds launched a campaign to run for chief of the Cherokee Nation against Chad Smith in the forthcoming general election. Leeds, who had supported Smith in a prior campaign, said that that Smith lost all objectivity and was not listening to or considering different perspectives. “There were subtle abuses of power occurring at many levels in the government,” Leeds wrote in an email. “But the idea that a sitting Principal Chief would orchestrate a popular vote to overturn a ruling of the Nation’s highest court and thereby strip a group of Cherokee citizens of their legal rights is a good example of why new leadership was necessary.”

With the petition’s 2,100 signatures now authenticated by the Cherokee Nation’s highest court and the tribal council, the date for the special constitutional amendment was set for March 3, 2007—just several months before an already scheduled general election. On this day, out of the 8,000 Cherokee citizens who cast votes, over three-quarters voted in favor of permanently excluding Cherokee Freedman descendants from tribal citizenship. [11] The nearly 2,800 Freedmen who were permitted to vote during the special election fell short of a victory. Nearly one year later to the day, Cornsilk’s victory was overturned.

Three weeks later, the Cherokee Nation tribal registrar issued letters to Freedmen descendants: “We regret to inform you that you are not eligible for citizenship in the Cherokee Nation.” Six days later, another letter was issued to each enrolled Cherokee Freedmen descendant. “This letter is to inform you that because of the Constitutional Amendment, you are no longer eligible to receive health services through Cherokee Nation,” the Cherokee Nation’s clinic administrator wrote. Two months later, Stacy Leeds lost in the general election to incumbent Chief Smith. She is now dean of the law school at the University of Arkansas.

“With only four months to put a campaign together with zero dollars in an initial campaign fund, we came very close to unseating a two-term incumbent,” Leeds said. Nearly twice as many Cherokee voted in the general election compared to the special election.

When Lincoln’s statue revealed itself drenched in light, Vann, who had been chatting with Velie, fell silent. 

freedman Lane is located in the area known as “four mile” outside of Tahlequah. Some of the Cherokee Nation’s former slaves are buried nearby in unmarked graves. Image by Sam Russell.

Race and Politics

Later that summer, in Washington, D.C., Representative Diane Watson, D-Los Angeles, caught wind of the Cherokee Freedmen’s disenrollment. At the time, Representative Watson served on the Congressional Black Caucus. After studying the case, meeting with Freedmen and their advocates, and checking the veracity of their statements with officials at Bureau of Indian Affairs,Watson drafted legislation.

From the moment Watson began seeking co- sponsors to the bill, the Cherokee Nation unleashed a comprehensive response. The bill’s scope and substance was sweeping and unequivocal. Its purpose was to “sever the United States relations with the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma until the Cherokee Nation restored the rights of the Freedman.” Congressman Mel Watt, D-North Carolina, who like Watson is black, co-sponsored the bill. “Once I reviewed the facts and the background information and history,” Congressman Watt said, “You don’t turn and look the other way.”

With hundreds of millions of federal dollars on the line, and millions more at stake related to its gaming license, [12] the Cherokee Nation applied extensive resources to its defense. Jack Abramoff, the Cherokee Nation’s former lobbyist—who was hired by Chief Smith to lobby on behalf of “sovereignty issues,” and who personally contributed to Smith’s campaign for Cherokee Principal Chief—was serving time in federal prison on unrelated convictions.The Cherokee Nation’s hired external lobbyists, Tony Podesta of the Podesta Group and brother of John Podesta, who was White House Chief of Staff in the Clinton Administration, and Lanny Davis, special counsel to President Clinton during his impeachment proceedings and now a D.C.- based lobbyist. The Cherokee Nation’s D.C. team applied primary pressure against Congress.

Officially, Podesta concentrated on battling against the proposed bill while Davis focused most of his energy on the ongoing Vann case. In practice, Davis also helped the Cherokee Nation lobby Congress to kill Watson’s proposed bill. As a former attorney to President Clinton, Davis is well connected in Washington—connected to a degree his fees reflect. “The Cherokee Nation put on a full court press,” explained Bert Hammond, principal advisor to Representative Watson. “I’m sure that their law firm got paid millions and millions of dollars to lobby on their behalf.” [13] As part of its policy, the Podesta Group does not discuss its relationships with current or former clients, and Lanny Davis did not respond to interview requests.

Watson, and other members of the Black Caucus introduced the bill, which was submitted in 2008 to the House Natural Resources and House Judiciary committees. The National NAACP supported the bill, framing the Cherokee Nation’s 2007 constitutional amendment as racist. Smith rejected the “inflammatory misrepresentations” against the tribe. “The 2007 vote to amend its constitution was a crucial vote for the future of the Cherokee Nation and its own sense of identity,” Smith wrote to members of Congress. “This vote has been falsely characterized as racist, while, in fact, the vote was for an explicit clarification of who is a documented Indian in regards to citizenship in the Cherokee Nation.”

Podesta and Davis, along with Paula Ragsdale, [14] the Cherokee Nation’s in-house D.C.-based lobbyist at the time, argued that the bill’s central issue was currently under

judicial review by U.S. Appeals Court and District Court of Washington, D.C. Cherokee lobbyists now felt that U.S. courts were best positioned to rule on the issue. Nearly five years after filing, the Vann case had not yet reached the merits stage.

Watson eventually changed the bill’s language so that it would be referred to the judiciary committee. The change was strategic because John Conyers, another member of the Black Caucus, chaired the committee at the time. It was expected that as a representative known for his leadership on civil rights issues, Conyers would lend his support to the Freedmen. But the bill failed to gather steam. Asked why the bill was eventually killed, Hammond replied, “my clinical reaction is that the Cherokee chief had been around here spreading money around,” he said. “And they have money to spread around. [15]”

Members of Congress, including Barney Frank, a Massachusetts representative at the time known for backing civil rights issues, lobbied the U.S. Justice Department to take action against the Cherokee Nation. The Podesta Group made similar appeals, this time before the Obama administration. On April 30, 2009, Representative Watson submitted a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder requesting that the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division open an investigation into the “plight of the Freedman” and Smith’s “illegal elections.” Holder did not respond until nearly four months later—that is, after President Obama appointed Kimberly Teehee, a Cherokee, as his Senior Policy Advisor for Native American Affairs. On August 12, 2009, Holder notified members of Congress of his unwillingness to open a civil rights investigation on Smith. Holder cited the pending Vann case in U.S. courts.

Jon Velie and marilyn Vann visit the National Lincoln memorial in washington, D.C. Image by Sam Russell.

The Jury Within

To ascend to the main floor of the National Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., Marilyn Vann, who suffers from health problems, required the assistance of an elevator. To reach it on a cool night this past October, Vann shuffled uneasily through a corridor beneath the memorial. The corridor doubles as a museum illustrating critical events that shaped the Civil Rights Movement. Walls are etched in black and white portraits of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose “I Have a Dream” speech crackled over loud speakers. Vann’s attorney, Jon Velie, joined her. The next morning, nearly a decade after they first filed their lawsuit, the two were once again due in federal court. But tonight, Vann wished to set her eyes on the memorial depicting the former president. Once at the top, the elevator’s doors drew open like stage curtains. When Lincoln’s statue revealed itself drenched in light, Vann, who had been chatting with Velie, fell silent.

From the outside, it is difficult to understand why the Vann case has yet to be argued on its merits. It is helpful to think about the case not as two parties on the same playing field seeking to right a wrong, but rather one party demanding that one country apply its laws or treaties over another. The case continues to unravel at a glacial pace because to the Cherokee Nation, its supreme authority to self-determination is at stake. Perhaps nobody understands this better than David Cornsilk. In spite of his staunch role advocating on behalf of the Freedmen, Cornsilk believes that each time the Cherokee Nation is dragged into a U.S. court, the tribe’s sovereignty is diminished. [16] Cornsilk blames the Cherokee Nation for exposing the tribe—and potentially establishing a dangerous precedent for all American Indian nations—over what he calls an unequivocal repression of the Cherokee Freedmen descendants’ tribal rights. Cornsilk says that there is simply no other option than to pursue justice in U.S. courts. To Cornsilk, the only hope for the Freedmen’s chance of regaining their tribal citizenship hinges on the work of Vann and Velie.

At the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals hearing the morning after Vann and Velie visited the Lincoln Memorial, those anticipating a resolution were sorely disappointed. As Jon Velie’s and Todd Hembree’s legal teams argued before three white federal appellate judges, there was a sense that something historical was unfolding. But nobody—not even the local law students who crowded near the front of the courtroom—seemed to have a firm grasp of what was occurring.“Tome,that was all legal mumbo jumbo,” a Freedmen descendant who lives in Washington, D.C., told me after the hearing. The lawyers argued over whether the chief of the Cherokee Nation could be named as a defendant—or in legal jargon, if Ex parte Young applies to the Cherokee Nation. Two months later, in December, the court ruled in favor of the Freedmen, delivering a blow to the Cherokee Nation and a victorious jolt to Vann, Velie, and Freedmen advocates.

The Vann case may now proceed, but in spite of the latest Freedmen victory, the case could drag on for years to come. In one instance, the Cherokee Nation could appeal this latest decision—a legal procedural decision—to the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s an attractive option. So far, the Cherokee Nation’s legal maneuvering has succeeded in stalling the Vann case. “The Cherokee Nation says that it wants this case to be settled, but what they’re really doing is delaying,”  Velie said, “while over 90 percent of the Freedmen are denied citizenship.” And at least in one glaringly obvious way, even if Velie’s team were to ultimately win the case, they have already lost. The Cherokee Freedmen descendants remain disenfranchised. It is no surprise then that nearly two years into his tenure, Freedmen descendants have grown increasingly disillusioned by Smith’s successor: Principal Chief Bill John Baker.

While Baker was still running for Chief of the Cherokee Nation and serving as a member of the Cherokee Nation Tribal Council, he agreed to sit down with me at his campaign headquarters. Baker’s campaign occupied a front office within Baker Furniture—a sprawling warehouse store he owns along Tahlequah’s main drag. Outside, a red, white, and blue two-story banner depicting Baker’s image fluttered against a breeze. I said to Baker that the majority of Cherokee Nation leadership positions appear to be filled by white-appearing Cherokee citizens. “Well, we’ve never been a tribe of full-bloods,” Baker said. When I mentioned that historians suggest that Freedmen descendants may have more Cherokee blood running through them than white-appearing “by-blood” Cherokee, Baker conceded that it wasn’t fair.

“Why don’t you and the tribal council change policy?” I asked.

“It is not fair,” Baker said. “But it is our way [17].”

Advocates say, however, that during his campaign, Baker positioned himself politically as an ally to the Freedmen cause only to later betray them after he won. Indeed, his rise to the tribe’s highest office was a consequence of the Freedmen vote, they say. Today, under federal agreement, only a small fraction of potential Cherokee Freedmen are permitted to vote in tribal elections. These are the 2,800 Freedmen descendants who successfully registered during the year-long window following Cornsilk’s tribal court victory and the tribal constitutional referendum that stripped it away. This highly limited number of Freedmen descendants are permitted to vote in tribal elections under an agreement between U.S. Congress, the Department of Interior, and the Cherokee Nation—while the Vann case plays out in U.S. courts.

In the June 2011 general tribal election, in which incumbent Chief Smith campaigned for his fourth term, it was first reported that Baker beat Smith by a handful of votes. Given Smith’s 12-year posture toward Freedmen descendants, advocates say that the fraction of potential Freedmen descendants who were permitted to vote supported Baker as a block—handing Baker an edge. The Cherokee Nation’s highest court later ruled that the June 2011 tribal election results were too close to call. Another general election was scheduled for that September. Then, in August, just three weeks before the newly scheduled special election, the same tribal court ruled to strip the voting rights of the marginal 2,800 Cherokee Freedmen descendants— in apparent violation of the federal agreement. Baker, joining the side of Freedmen advocates, was outraged. After all, without the fractional Freedmen vote, the election would have no doubt once again swung in Smith’s favor.

For years, Freedmen advocacy journalists and bloggers have vilified the tribe and its leaders with little balance, framing the Cherokee leaders and citizens as racists. 

After Representative Frank and his colleagues protested, the federal government froze tens of millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer funds scheduled for distribution to the Cherokee Nation that fall. An emergency U.S. court hearing took place in Washington, D.C., days before the September election. The ruling—another Velie victory—led to the reinstatement of voting rights to the limited 2,800 Freedmen. The public relations damage to Smith and his administration surged. Smith never recovered. Baker ended up winning the special general election by an even wider margin. [18] Now, thrust into his second year as chief, as the Vann case drags on, [19] the hopes held among Freedmen descendants that Baker would drop the U.S. court case and support their cause have all but evaporated.

Many of those sentiments have served to only strengthen the case against the Cherokee Nation within the court of public opinion. It is here that the Cherokee Nation may be fighting a losing battle. Each time the Vann case twists and turns, the tribe is forced into the public relations quagmire that comes with defending against a decade-long lawsuit in which race—at least appears—to play a critical role. For years, Freedmen advocacy journalists and bloggers have vilified the tribe and its leaders with little balance, framing the Cherokee leaders and citizens as racists. In cases where race is the central question of law, this court tends to favor the plaintiffs. [20]

On the ground in Tahlequah, there are signs emerging that the entrenched division surrounding the Freedmen controversy that once so heavily blanketed the Cherokee Nation is slowly receding. Cherokee citizens have grown undoubtedly more docile, and in many cases, supportive of the Freedmen. “I think they have a right to claim citizenship,” a teenage full-blood Cherokee told me after a powwow. Perhaps unfairly, fear of appearing racist—even if race is not, in fact, a factor—has taken a stronger hold. This may help explain why Corey Still, the University of Oklahoma full- blood Cherokee, had a change of heart. After the public debate in Norman, when the floor opened for questions, Still aggressively cross-examined Jon Velie from the audience. When I approached Still afterwards and introduced myself as a journalist and filmmaker, he agreed to share his personal feelings about the Freedmen during a formal interview. Months later, Still changed his mind.

Cornsilk attributes any changing tide, however slight, not to the tribe’s public relations woes or new strategy, but to education. He says that the case has helped reveal the truth about the Cherokee Freedmen to the rest of the tribe. Many Cherokee who did vote against the Freedmen in 2007 are regretful of doing so now, he said. “Overcoming racism is a long process,” Cornsilk said. He believes that if another constitutional referendum took place today, while close, the Freedmen would be welcomed back into the tribe. What Cornsilk and Velie have achieved through their legal advocacy— from within and outside the tribe respectively—is given voice to Freedmen descendants like Lucy Allen and Marilyn Vann. And if part of their goal is to force more Cherokee to confront their own stained history with slavery, and move closer toward tribal reconciliation, then no matter the outcome of the Vann case, they are winning.

Cornsilk attributes any changing tide, however slight, not to tribe’s public relations woes or new strategy, but to education.

Velie is less optimistic, not about the potential of the Cherokee people to support the Freedmen, but of their tribal political leaders to abstain from leveraging race for political gains. Velie says that, at present, the vast majority of the Cherokee Freedmen still cannot vote or run for tribal office. He is charging on. If Velie is ultimately successful in the U.S. courts, one person now poised to help process Freedmen descendants—like Kenneth Payton [21] and Rodslen Brown-King and their children— as newly minted Cherokee citizens is none other than David Cornsilk. This January, Chief Bill John Baker hired David Cornsilk to return to work within the Cherokee Nation Registration Office. There was one condition. Cornsilk would have to cease from publically criticizing the tribe’s position toward its Freedmen descendants. When the job was first offered, Cornsilk was still living in his car. Regardless, Cornsilk refused to sign the gag order. In need of a talented genealogist—or perhaps in the execution of the long-tested political strategy of keeping friends close, enemies closer—the Cherokee Nation hired Cornsilk anyway. Cornsilk has since moved into a new apartment.

 

David Cornsilk in his Honda Civic. Image by Sam Russell.

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Footnotes

1. 1. After U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Hoke Smith, wrote the let- ter to the Dawes Commission demanding the abolition of tribal governments, he moved from Washington, D.C., to Georgia. In 1906, Hoke Smith ran successfully for governor—an event that sparked race riots across Georgia’s capital. Hoke Smith ran on a platform promising to pass a state constitutional amendment strip- ing the voting rights of blacks. The Civil War had ended nearly half a century earlier, freeing slaves and outlawing its practice across the country. Yet under Hoke Smith’s administration, Georgia passed some of the most virulent Jim Crow laws. Over the next six decades, they assured the dominance of white political and economic power at the expense of blacks.

2. The Nellie Johnstone Number One was the first commercial oil well drilled in what was then Indian Territory. After obtaining a lease from the Cherokee Nation, George Keeler, William Johnstone, and Frank Overlees, working with the Cudahy Oil Company, drilled the well on April 15, 1897. According to Frank F. Finny, in Chronicles of Oklahoma, until the “Cudahy well came in the evidence that oil could be found in important quantities in Indian Territory was inconclusive . . . ”

3.Subsections of the Dawes Rolls served to distinguish the tribe’s primary factions: mixed-bloods, full-bloods, adopted Indians, and Freedmen. Historians argue that the distinctions were designed not because one group listed on the Dawes Rolls was considered more or less Indian than the other, but rather to protect the economic interests of full-bloods, who were still rooted in their own language and culture. Many full-bloods were so distrustful of the federal government that they hid out from Dawes commissioners. “The tragedy is, those who are the most Indian are not considered Indian today,” Professor Agnew said. Many Freedmen, meanwhile, descended not just from slaves but African mothers and Cherokee fathers. “Masters frequently made use of female slaves, and those slaves produced children,” Agnew explained. “John Ross was an eighth Indian. And I suspect that many of the Freedmen have more Indian blood than that.”

4. Many Cherokee slaves were branded like cattle, stripped of their identity, and bestowed with the surnames of their Cherokee mas- ters. According to Rudi Halliburton, Jr., author of Red Over Black: Black Slavery Among the Cherokee Indians, slaves who attempted to escape—and there were many—were hunted with dogs. Cherokee militias were often formed to track and capture runaway slaves, who were promptly returned to their masters or publicly executed, serving as a warning to others.

5. Indeed, Jon Velie’s pro bono civil rights career launched when the lawsuit he and is team filed on behalf of Seminole Freedmen in the U.S. courts was ruled in their favor. To Velie and other advocates, it was a win. But today, 13 years later, it is also perceived as a loss. “Does racism exist? Of course it does,” Jon Velie said. “But this is legal racism.” And to Velie, the implications of the ongoing Cherokee Nation litigation extend from Tahlequah to Wewoka and across Indian country.

6. These sentiments emerged in the exchange of letters written by officials from the Department of Interior to Chief Smith and the Cherokee Nation.

7. When Smith was still chief he said through a spokesperson that he could not comment on the case because it was currently being litigated. I later approached him personally, he refused to answer my questions regarding the case. After he lost the tribal election, I called his private law office and left multiple messages with his secretary requesting an interview. He did not return my calls.

8. Velie felt that all elections that took place in 2003 were illegal because the Freedmen were not permitted to vote. Velie wanted the elections invalidated.

9.Like the federal government and states, federally recognized tribes normally enjoy general immunity from lawsuits. For petitioners like the Freedmen, this often leaves no other option but to sue in tribal courts. In Roger Nero’s case, which was in essence, a civil rights case, Nero attempted to sue in US Courts over his right to vote in a tribal election. But his petition was too narrow and focused on the particulars of tribal registration policy. As a consequence, a judge held that permitting the case to be decided in US Courts would curb the tribe’s capacity to “maintain itself as a culturally and politically distinct entity.” It ruled that the proper jurisdiction for Nero’s suit was in tribal court.

10. Here, Chief Smith’s choice of word (“classes”) is laced in racial undertones. It is precisely this kind of tone and choice of wording that caused many Freedmen to feel offended by Chief Smith’s political rhetoric.

11. During an interview with Todd Hembree, I asked if the 2007 Cherokee constitutional amendment that overturned Cornsilk’s landmark tribal ruling and removed the Cherokee Freedmen was political. Hembree said that he is a realist. “It wasn’t a mere coincidence that we had a special election in March of 2007 when there was a general election a few months later.” But then he revealed that after years fighting against Cornsilk in tribal court and losing, during the 2007 special election he personally voted against the constitutional amendment that removed the Freedmen. “I did not vote for that petition, but that is my right as an individual,” Hembree said. “Now, when the Cherokee people speak in overwhelming percentages, that’s who I represent

12. Cherokee Nation’s chief concern, according to interviews, was that the bill threatened the tribe’s license to operate casinos. At the time, gaming made up the majority of the tribe’s business arm’s $520 million in annual revenue. Curiously, members of Congress who ultimately co-supported the bill were unaware that the Cherokee Nation’s business arm, then known as Cherokee Industries, was engaged in manufacturing contracts with the Department of Defense. Also, according to a senior official within the Cherokee’s business arm, had the Watson bill become law, the tribe’s defense contracts would have remained intact, though this seems unlikely.

13. According to public filings, the Podesta Group, a registered lobbying group, earned $60,000 per year for their directly lobbying efforts and certainly much more for “counsel” and “advice”. However, because Lanny Davis was hired as an attorney, as opposed to a lobbyist, his fee remains unknown. He has been rumored to charge $600 per hour.

14. Findings also suggest that relationships—which in this case extended even beyond the incestuous nature known for fueling D.C. politics—played a significant role in killing the proposed legislation. Pat Ragsdale, the then number three at the Bureau of Indian Affairs within the Department of Interior, is married to Paula Ragsdale, the Cherokee Nation’s internal D.C. lobbyist.

15. During a 2011 public event in Tulsa marking the commem- oration of the Tulsa Race Riots, then-Chief Smith responded to accusations of tribal racism targeting blacks by showing the audience a video recording of a speech John Conyers delivered at the tribe’s headquarters in 2009. The substance of Conyers’ speech focused on the Trail of Tears; he did not mention the Freedmen. It is presumed that Smith hoped Conyers’ presence at the Cherokee Nation alone was vindication.

16. Though they share similarities, Native American tribes are not states. They are semi-autonomous nations with inherent sovereign rights. “Without sovereignty, we’re nothing more than a Kiwanis club or a Rotary club,”Todd Hembree said.

17. Since last year’s election, Chief Baker has turned down requests to be interviewed.

18. “Let’s hope that the new chief has a better attitude,” Congressman Watt said. “And if he doesn’t, we’ll fight the new chief just like we did Chief Smith.” Freedmen advocates, particularly David Cornsilk, have been disappointed in the apparent reluctance of members of Congress to take action to support the Freedmen cause.

19. Today, the Cherokee Nation argues that the 1866 Treaty guaranteed membership rights to Freedmen and their descendants. In 1867, the Cherokee Nation amended their tribal constitution to include the word “citizenship” rights to their Freedmen. Now, the tribe says that it had a sovereign right to do so, just as it had an equal right to amend their constitution nearly 150 years later to remove their Freedmen descendants by tribal constitutional amendment. The tribe supports the 1866 Treaty, but believes there is a distinction between membership rights and citizenship rights.

20. Where Baker has largely fallen silent on the Freedmen controversy since taking office, Todd Hembree has spoken openly about the case. In doing so, Hembree is leading the official shift in tone toward the Cherokee Freedmen—from the top down. It is an important front in the tribe’s new public relations strategy. Gone is the combative tone toward Cherokee Freedmen that helped define the Smith administration. Hembree has helped replace it with a sense of transparency and civility, while still doggedly litigating against Velie and the Freedmen’s claims. The night before the Cherokee Nation Tribal parade—as Rodslen Brown-King and her family wheeled the Freedmen float into place for the next morning’s festivities—Hembree dined with the owners of one of Tahlequah’s finer dining establishments. Comfortable in a dark suit, seemingly earnest, and at ease rubbing shoulders with Tahlequah’s elite, it’s hard not to see Hembree for his own political ambitions. He looks like a lot like a chief waiting in the wings.

As it turns out, tribal politics are in Hembree’s blood; he is the great- great grandson of Cherokee Nation Principal Chief John Ross, who was seven-eighths Scottish. This helps explain why Hembree also looks white. The color of Hembree’s skin makes him no less Cherokee, he says. “If someone thinks that just because we’re light- skinned we don’t live a Cherokee life or believe in the Cherokee ways,” Hembree said, “I’m just going to sadly disagree with them.” David Cornsilk finds this double standard prevalent throughout the Cherokee Nation. Cornsilk says that one who looks Caucasian and calls oneself Cherokee isn’t questioned, but if one who appears black claims Cherokee citizenship, he or she is discriminated against.

Hembree, like his former boss, Chief Smith, is adamant that the Freedmen case has never been about race. What matters to Todd Hembree now, however, is that the people of the Cherokee Nation have spoken; the referendum that led to the Cherokee’s tribal constitution amendment was legal, and his job is clear: to defend Cherokee law and the tribe’s sovereign rights. “Without sovereignty, we’re nothing more than a Rotary club,” Hembree said. American Indian tribes are sovereign, but to what extent? Stacy Leeds, the former tribal justice—whose crucial tribal court decision ruled in favor of Cornsilk’s legal argument over Hembree’s—said that there is no doubt that a tribe has a sovereign right to define its citizenship. “There is also no doubt that sovereignty cannot be a reason for casting legality and morality aside,” she said.

21. On an overcast afternoon last spring at Kenneth Payton’s home in Broken Arrow, he flipped through a series of family photographs.“To be included and to feel included would change the whole dynamic,” he said. As Payton’s sons horsed around upstairs, I asked Payton if his children understood their heritage. “The younger ones, if somebody came up to them they would say, ‘Yeah, I’m Indian,” he said. On the surface, Payton appears black, and Hembree white, but draw in closer and gradations emerge. For all of their divisiveness, Freedmen and Cherokee officials share one common purpose: closing the gap between how they perceive themselves from the within, and how they are perceived from the outside.

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Originally published in This Land, Vol. 4 Issue 10. May 15, 2013.

Support journalism like this when you subscribe to This Land.

The cover image is an illustration a photo taken of Cherokee Freedmen descended Robert Banks. In 2011, it was exhibited in collaboration with the Smithsonian National Museum of American Indian and displayed during a 2011 show at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art. The photo is also reproduced inside the 5/15 edition of This Land. The photographer, Peggy Fontenot, is Cherokee, and her portrait comes from the acclaimed series ”Merging Cultures and Surviving Assimilation: The Contemporary Native American.” The photo is poignant for different reasons. It shows a man of apparent African descent in Native American attire. And it also depicts a Cherokee Freedmen wearing a headdress, when traditional Cherokee dress never included a headdress.

The image was never meant to portray the Cherokee people; it was meant to convey the confusion surrounding the Cherokee Freedmen. In order to appropriately convey the  confusion, we turned to an important image that captured the complexity of the subject matter. The decision to proceed with this controversial image was debated internally, prior to publication, and eventually approved as the most effective image for our cover. As Oklahomans, we understand the sensitivities surrounding issues involving Native American affairs. We also understand the importance of conveying accurate images about Native American traditions. With these values in mind, the image of a Cherokee Freedmen in a headdress stands as a powerful symbol for the confusion that surrounds the Freedmen identity, and it serves as the image we have chosen to most accurately represent the reporting contained in this important edition of This Land.

May 21, 2008. Radisson Hotel, Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Frank K. Berry U.S. Chess Championship. Two International Chess Masters sit at an ugly green table in a cramped room, taking a deep breath. Two deep breaths.

Both women were born in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Both women scored an impressive 7.5 (of 9 possible) in the round-robin stage of the U.S. Women’s Chess Championship [1] over the last nine days, but Irina Krush did it without losing a game. [2] The tiebreakers must be played on the same day as the previous round ended, because the awards ceremony is in the evening.

Krush is wearing black and playing the white pieces. Her opponent, Anna Zatonskih, is wearing white and playing the black pieces.

Krush and Zatonskih are both married to Grandmasters, and both have held this title (U.S. Women’s Chess Champion) before. Krush, the younger player, captured it at only 14 years old. [3]

Zatonskih was twice that age when she won it all in 2006. The following year’s tournament was in Oklahoma, and Krush got the title back. She defends it—hard—here at the Radisson.

Both women are right-handed. That might have, in fact, been the deciding factor.

***

“This is the kind of decision that one has to take intuitively…you either believe that white’s position can hold or not.” -Judit Polgár

I’m going through Grandmaster (GM) Judit Polgár’s How I Beat Fischer’s Record, trying to sort out how a bishop move “deviates from the initial plan in order to stop 10 … f4.” It’s easy enough for Polgár to say, but I’m not privy to the “initial plan,” nor am I clear how this stops f4. I get it after a minute or so, but Polgár analyzes these alternative lines instantly, without mediation. My lips move when I read over these games; Polgár just enjoys the story.

Chess players gravitate toward one of two approaches: positional or tactical. In positional chess, a player gradually establishes something of a fortress on the board, and patiently improves the placement of every piece. Pawns evolve into little wooden constellations, and appear to be named accordingly: “the Dragon,” “the Stonewall,” “the d5 Chain.” The opponent is not so much attacked as eroded away under gathering storm clouds of threats.

By contrast, tactical chess focuses on the lightning strike—the fleeting moments that offer a quick and decisive advantage. An opponent’s queen is pinned, or an irresistible sacrifice is offered that baits the hook of a mating attack. Middlebrow players (affectionately called “patzers”) focus either on tactical or positional play. GMs do both. [4] It’s a kind of ambidexterity.

The Fischer in the title is, of course, the American World Champion Bobby Fischer—if not the greatest player of all time, certainly a light that burned very bright (but not for very long).

Polgár beat Fischer’s record for “youngest grandmaster in history” by attaining the title at 15 years, 4 months (Fischer had taken a glacial 15 years and 6 months to get there). This occurred at the Radisson hotel in Budapest; Polgár’s victory in the Hungarian National Championship secured her final GM requirement. This long-awaited book surprised many with its positional astuteness, since Judit is known as one of the greatest tacticians of all time.

But the most fascinating statements in the book are like this one: “There was no question of calculating all the lines until the happy end. I mainly relied on my intuition, which said that White’s underdeveloped army should not be able to offer adequate protection to the exposed king.” Polgár tosses away pawns, even major pieces, to grab vague advantages like “strengthening control of the white squares.”

Playing a game that epitomizes cold reason, Polgár thinks and talks about personalities:

“11.h3? This is a very provocative move. Did he not know who he was dealing with?! Just a few years later, my opponents would display more caution in such situations.”

The question mark after “h3” indicates a “blunder.” Wikipedia says chess blunders are “usually caused by some tactical oversight, whether from time trouble, overconfidence or carelessness.” Costa’s overconfidence versus Polgár merits the question mark because it leads to one of those lightning strikes in short order. I flip back a couple pages to the start of the game to check the names and date. Jean-Luc Costa vs. Judit Polgár, Biel Chess Festival, 1987. Polgár had just turned 11.

***

“I’m playing chess with my dad…’chess.’ It’s a game, like Monopoly.” -Searching for Bobby Fisher

James E. Berry became president of Stillwater National Bank on the day the market crashed in October 1929. He did not jump out of a window (as a matter of historical fact, no one did), but thrived, eventually becoming the longest-serving lieutenant governor in Oklahoma’s history. His house at 502 S. Duck Street is in the National Register of Historic places.

Frank Berry was born on June 15, 1945, in Washington, D.C. So was his brother Jim. That, in a nutshell, is how twins work. Grandsons of the famous lieutenant governor, and the only children of a WWII soldier killed just two months before their birth, the Berry brothers have vast, deep Oklahoma roots despite their Yankee nativity.

Both men are among the top 50 chess players in Oklahoma, but Jim is slightly stronger. He could feasibly draw with the 11-year-old Polgár. Jim served as president of USCF for two years, while Frank, a retired banker and credit analyst, is a FIDE International Arbiter, of which there are about 30 in the U.S. Between the two of them, they have directed hundreds of tournaments since 1991, but only the one in Tulsa triggered a YouTube sensation.

The days of the chess media circus, with Fischer as the headline-grabbing ringleader, are long past. Local papers will run announcements about the championship, but do not in any sense cover it. In fact, the USCF is on life support, having lost the support of the American Foundation for Chess (AF4C). So the Berry brothers paid all prizes and expenses out of pocket to host the U.S. Chess Championship in Oklahoma. Twice.

I get the feeling Frank would rather be talking about opening strategy.

“Have you ever played a rated tournament?” he asks, almost before I can introduce myself. “I might answer differently, depending on your level.”

He and Jim caught the USCF between sponsors, as it were, and their off er to foot the bill—if the matches were played in the Sooner state—was accepted.

“We thought it would be good for Oklahoma, and we wanted to see if we could do it,” Frank says.

No business or government support materialized. For the 2007 Stillwater tournament, the Berrys personally hauled some of the chess masters 70 miles, from the Tulsa International Airport, in a van. This inspired them to relocate for the next year. During the 2008 tournament, the Radisson hit the brothers with fees for every request for equipment or special arrangements.

***

“…After talking with the players, I realized that it wasn’t the size of the room or the number of players in it–it was the way we had the tables arranged. We initially had them in three long rows, with two boards per 8-foot table. This psychologically made them feel ‘together’ and thus a bit crowded.” -Tom Braunlich of Broken Arrow, Chief Tournament Organizer

Bobby Fischer made chess popular partly by shaping it into a battle among superstars—and superpowers, in the days when there were more than one—but Irina Krush is an anti-diva, disarmingly casual in interviews and easy to please on the road. A glass of wine and the pool at the Radisson suffice to make her happy.

Fischer pounded on the chess community with his immense personality until the cash prizes reached amounts no one had thought possible. Once the money started coming in, the TV cameras showed up. To this day, in 2013, Krush keeps her forks and knives in a plastic Eskimo Joe’s cup she picked up, along with the trophy, at the 2007 event in Stillwater.

In the 19th century, the U.S. champion was decided “by acclamation,” which was very convenient for them, since it was more or less a vote on the year’s MVP. By contrast, the Vienna International Tournament of 1882 went 18 rounds over six weeks; it ended in a tie. Anticlimax is a bitch.

The first women’s championship was a year after the inaugural 1936 tournament for men. It lasted three weeks, and Adele Rivero of Manhattan won. Mary Bain took second prize, which was a beauty kit donated by Mr. C. A. Pfeiffer. Debate rages on whether there ought to be separate tournaments (and separate titles, such as FIDE’s “Woman GM”) for the two sexes. Irina Krush, who has competed for the “male” championship, chimed in when interviewed by the Wall Street Journal in 2009: “I don’t see their benefit. Women’s titles are really a marker of lower expectations.” In the other corner, Jennifer Shahade, author of Chess Bitch: “I have stopped thinking about such events as less than the events with men and started to think of them as a way to meet and compete with female colleagues.”

The 2008 championships (one for men, one for women, both in Tulsa) were nine days long—about medium size. Krush’s first game of the final day was the longest of the tournament: 108 moves over six hours. The other games averaged less than half of that. Just 15 minutes after that marathon (a draw), the women started the playoff tiebreakers with two 15-minutes per-player “rapid” games. Each one won one, as White.

In the five-minute “blitz” games that followed, the two finalists each played once as White, and once as Black. Zatonskih blundered away her game as White on the 31st move. She claims that she lost on time while “1 piece and 2 pawns up” but the board (pictured below) shows her giving away the queen on the last move.

Now Krush needed only a draw, and had the advantage of being White. It was not to be, though. Zatonskih used her five minutes to unleash a brilliant attack and even it up again.

***

The (my?) mind resists equilibrium. Tie games, cochampions, equality… where’s the fun in that? We need a queen of the mountain—a concrete individual we can point to and say, “This is as good as it gets. At least this year.”

Most ties are settled by more of the game: extra innings, overtime, shootouts. There’s a debate among soccer fans about whether penalty-kick shootouts are soccer, but we can leave that aside for now. The players are using their feet, at least. In some cases, you do a lot more of what you’re tied at. Ask John Isner and Nicolas Mahut about their 11-hour tennis match sometime.

Outside of chess, you’ll never see what happened at the Radisson. There must be a champion after this game, so it will be an “Armageddon” game. If the game is drawn, the champion will be Zatonskih, who has an inherent disadvantage, being Black.

But it’s not quite disadvantage enough. Since a draw is the most likely outcome of any chess game at this level, Krush will get 33 percent more time: six minutes to Anna’s four and a half. The last 10 of those 630 seconds will be among the most controversial moments in recent U.S. sports.

***

“This film has been dissected as much as the Zapruder JFK assassination film.”-Julian Wan of Ann Arbor, Michicgan, On Zatonskih vs. Krush, 2008, Tulsa

There are 10 people in the two-minute, 47-second video. One man disappears from the frame after a few seconds, but likely remains in attendance. The same night, 31 million people are watching David Cook win Season 7 of American Idol. [5] In the bottom right corner of the video, you can see a second camera. There is a painting on the back wall, of what I’m going to go ahead and call a grassy knoll. Nobody knows what a “knoll” is anyway.

I’ve watched it at least 50 times. Frank has identified the figures in the background: GM Larry Kaufman, WGM Tsagaan Battsetseg, Mike Tubbs of Lawton, competitor Courtney Jamison, and her mother… I’ve watched it slowed down to a fifth, a tenth, of normal speed, and still don’t know where the time goes exactly.

***

The New York Times article about the Tulsa championship includes a game sheet ending with the official moves:

39. Rb5 c4
40. Rb7 c3
41. Flag

Zatonskih’s c-pawn is threatening mate if it makes it to c1 and becomes a queen. Krush obtains one of the most powerful mating setups as well—a rook deep in enemy territory, on the seventh rank, as time expires. The game has ended. Officially.

In the video, however, at least six moves are clearly made by each player after number 40. The official ending is probably correct in one sense: those last moves are not chess. They are something else.

The clock is on the far side of the table, to Krush’s left and Zatonskih’s right, so it’s a shorter trip for black’s dominant hand. There is a Pause button in the middle of the clock. Either player can use this to suspend the match if an illegal move is made.

Zatonskih wears bangs and has a roundish face, not unlike a young Sandrine Bonnaire. At first, she keeps returning her hand to her chin after each move, adopting one-second-long “Thinker” poses, as if anyone has time to think. Krush repeatedly spends her extra half-second rolling up the sleeve of her black jacket.

When Krush releases the rook in move 39, the sleeve knocks over her pawn on b2. Nobody says anything; there isn’t time. Zatonskih’s hand has been poised over her own pawn during Krush’s move, and she moves to c3 while Krush is reaching for her clock. The two button presses sound like two sticks flam tapping a snare drum. Irina looks perturbed.

She’s moving at the same time as I am. While my clock is running! Should I protest? Do I have time to protest? No. Just a few more seconds; I’m way ahead. I can win this. Nearly all of Krush’s initial time advantage has evaporated. The clocks cannot be read in the video, but the players’ recollections put them at around 10 seconds for Krush, and less than three for Zatonskih. There is no question of a win or draw; one player is going to lose when her time hits zero. Krush is way ahead in time and in position, but the latter doesn’t matter.

Krush grabs her rook again, intending to make a fast, meaningless move to force Zatonskih’s clock down—but realizes that the pawn at c3 can now promote to queen, with check in only two moves. There’s no time to figure out a safe path out of check. There’s no time for reasoning.

41. bxc3 Rd8

Krush snatches up her b2 pawn—the one that’s still rolling on its square—and uses it to capture the advancing black pawn. Zatonskih again uses the tenth of a second between the move and the clock punch to move her rook.

Nonsense moves follow. The rooks on the back two ranks go side to side like targets at an animatronic shooting range. 42. Rbd7 Rc8 43. Rc7 Rd8 44. Red7 Rb8. Zatonskih looks completely unfazed.

She knocked a piece over and didn’t replace it. Should I protest? Do I have time to protest? Why is the pause button so small? It would take two seconds just to get my finger on it…

***

The Fischer-Spassky 1972 World Championship match in Reykjavik, Iceland, is the most famous, and the most unorthodox, chess match in history. Five consecutive winners had all hailed from the Soviet Union, even before the two-decade reign of the anagrammatic pair of champions, Kasparov and Karpov. The American choked in the first game, then forfeited the second when he refused to play with cameras present. It looked hopeless, but Fischer regrouped to destroy Spassky, six wins to one, over the next 24 days. When Spassky resigned the 21st game (by telephone) Fischer became the champion.

Spassky eventually conceded by telephone, with three scheduled games left unplayed.

Irina Krush is in Reykjavik at time of this writing, balancing 5-year-old recollections of Tulsa with preparations for an imminent game against GM Ivan Sokolov.

“I enjoyed my trips to Oklahoma. I’m trying to remember why exactly, but nothing specific comes to mind,” Krush  says. “I think the hospitality of the Berry brothers was one factor, plus the hotel in Stillwater had a nice indoor pool.”

***

At 66.5 seconds in, Irina knocks over another piece—her own rook. It rolls completely off the board, but she doesn’t need it; she has another rook on the same rank, an insurmountable advantage. In chess.

But the chess game has been over for a while. Zatonskih’s left hand is oddly cupped under her massive, new-mother’s bosom. Krush’s hand swoops over to the button and back, but Zatonskih’s darts at it like a lizard’s tongue. The last few attacks on the clock visibly shake the entire table. Someone chuckles in the chaos.

At 69.1 seconds, Zatonskih gestures at the clock, on which the electronic flag is lit. Zatonskih’s side of the display has one second left on it.

Irina has said that her career developed aspects of her personality that she associates with masculinity. “Chess has definitely made me kind of androgynous in that way… Competitiveness, analytical thinking, calculation, motivation, drive…a certain kind of like resilience and stoicness, persistence,” says the insanely pretty champ. At this moment, though, she has what can only be described as an outburst.

“Oh, come on!” she shouts, already halfway out of her chair. With her right hand, she swats her king off the board. Off the table. It hits a spectator—Courtney Jamison—on the leg. The room is silent; Zatonskih makes two quick “sorry about that” gestures with her hands, and returns to her “Thinker” pose.

***

“It’s not a woman’s game.”- Helene, played by Sandrine Bonnaire, Queen to Play

In Reykjavik, Irina chose the Bogo-Indian Defense against Sokolov, and resigned after her too-ambitious pawn strike leads to a bruising counterattack. I get the feeling that this fouls her mood a bit.

“[The 2008 Championship] is not a particularly pleasant memory for me. I have no interest in reliving it,” she says.

“At OSU basketball games, they have these little halftime contests for a $4,000 scooter,” Frank says. “They see how many Ding Dongs you can balance on your nose or something… They had one tiebreaker where they went down to paper, scissors, and stones. This was basically just like that.”

In the aftermath of Armageddon 2008, Krush watches the video, and sends an open letter to Chess Life Online, asserting that she and Zatonskih should be declared co-champions. The 7.5-point tie in the previous round has already established that the prize money will be split between them, about $4,000 each. Krush’s complaint was about the title. “To continue into the future, unthinkingly parroting that Anna Zatonskih is the 2008 U.S. Women’s Champion with no regard for how she ‘won’ this title, is a travesty of truth and justice… I am asking for responses to this letter from Frank Berry and Bill Goichberg.”

Krush’s argument is economic, almost philosophical. “When my opponent moved on my time, however innocuous that may appear to be, I believe that she was committing one of the worst transgressions possible: depriving me, through unfair means, of the just rewards of my labor.” Ayn Rand would be proud.

“Sharing the title would be an acceptable outcome for me,” Krush writes, “but I would certainly welcome any initiative to decide the title in over-the-board games, with real time controls that don’t degrade the participants into clock-punching monkeys.”

Her appeal fails; there are clearly aberrant actions, such as failing to restore fallen pieces, which balance out the irregularities by Zatonskih. For every sympathetic reply to her letter, there is an admonition to “get over it” or an accusation of bad sportsmanship.

“They’re all weak, all women. They’re stupid compared to men,” Bobby Fischer once said. “They shouldn’t play chess, you know. They’re like beginners. They lose every single game against a man.” He is said to have changed his mind about this in later life, but if so, he did not speak publicly about it.

One thing he definitely changed is the kind of clock used. Steadfastly refusing to allow any nonrational aspects to contaminate the game (“I don’t believe in psychology. I believe in good moves”), Fischer created the “increment clock.” This is a device that adds a small amount of time—say, five seconds—to a player’s side every time she hits the button. If she can think and move instantly, there will always be at least those five seconds to hit the button and roll up her sleeve again, if she wishes.

Variations on Fischer’s invention have been used in all championship tiebreaks since 2008; there will be no more clock-punching monkeys.

Krush leaves Reykjavik for Kazakhstan soon, for the March 2013 Women’s World Chess Team Championship; she and Zatonskih—the formerly clashing titans— are now teammates, at least for two weeks. The U.S. team finishes in the middle of the pack, but scores a surprising 2.5-1.5 victory over Russia in the seventh round, thanks in part to Irina’s victory over Grandmaster Alexandra Kosteniuk.

And in a very real sense, her request to share the title was also granted.

The last seven U.S. Women’s Champions are, in order:

Zatonskih (2006)
Krush (2007)
Zatonskih (2008)
Zatonskih (2009)
Krush (2010)
Zatonskih (2011)
Krush (2012)

Footnotes
1. The U.S. Championship is the most prestigious tournament in the country, having been held regularly (almost annually) since 1936, under the auspices of the U.S. Chess Federation (USCF). Bobby Fischer also won the 1963 tournament with a perfect 11 wins and no draws. This is a record.
2. 6 wins, 0 losses, 3 draws = 7.5; Anna Zatonskih’s 7-1-1 adds up to the same.
3. When Krush became a national champion at that age, she beat a different Fischer record by a few months. Does it count, since she was only the women’s champion?
4. In a few “Super GMs,” the two approaches melt into each other: “Tactics flow from a superior position,” according to Fischer, and Polgár will make an abstract positional improvement arise from a clever trick.
5. Prior to American Idol, Cook worked for a year as a bartender at the Blank Slate, on 1st and Detroit, in Tulsa.

Originally published in This Land, Vol. 4 Issue 9. May 1,2013.

He came around the counter and started parading me past the restaurant walls, pointing to the photos and articles proudly mounted. “Have you read this? You should really read all these.” The photos are black and white and grainy. He pulled out a Nelson’s sign from behind the counter, a photo of the original cook. He wanted to show me the history of the place, the long story, and then he wanted me to have about five slices of pie. I welcomed the former, but had to politely and repeatedly decline the latter. As he unearthed relics and explained the décor, it became very clear very quickly that my day’s lunch wasn’t simply the home-cooked chicken fried steak I came for; it was generations of owners and cooks,nwait staff and patrons. Nelson’s, to those who can remember, is a dynasty of comfort food. So, lunch was much more than my plate. It was a tribute to a tradition—one in transition.

As any connoisseur knows, good chicken fried steak takes a lot of abuse. You start by selecting a no-nonsense round steak and pounding the hell out of it. Use any weapon at hand. When you think you’ve tenderized the protein to a pulp, take it another round for good measure. In their book Texas Home Cooking, cookbook couple Cheryl and Bill Jamison advise, “You must pound the round steak as if you’re training for a night of S&M.”

Now that you’ve assaulted that sad, stringy, washcloth piece of meat, alternate dredging and dunking. First flour, then egg, then flour. It’s a culinary tar and feathering of sorts. The poor steak, punished and demoralized, will now masquerade as a chicken. You place the meat into bubbling fat—Crisco is a Southern favorite— for a nice, golden-brown fry. After removing and draining, spot your steak on a plate and drown him in gravy, for the proper humiliation.

The oily, creamy, crunchy result is vaguely steak, recognizable mostly throughout the South. Oklahoma claims chicken fried steak as its official state meal along with black-eyed peas, cornbread, corn on the cob, okra, strawberries, sausage and gravy, barbecued pork, squash, grits, biscuits, and pecan pie.

Those who care to debate whether good CFS descends from cowboy chuck wagon grub or German Wienerschnitzel might find themselves short an audience. Either way, chicken fried steak has become a way of life in Oklahoma and, at Nelson’s, a livelihood. Their version routinely comes up in debates about the best CFS in town and can be credited for carrying the Nelson family restaurant dynasty.

Nelson Rogers Sr. opened the original Nelson’s Buffeteria at 13 W. Fourth St. in 1929, the year of the crash. Patrons of this first Nelson’s waited out the door and entered to hollers of, “Hello, chicken fried!” This location enjoyed the imaginable success of a good Southern restaurant in Tulsa’s “Oil Capital of the World” era. Twenty years later, the restaurant moved to 514 S. Boston Ave., and Suzanne and Nelson Rogers Jr. took command of the cafeteria-style kitchen. In 2004, the Boston location closed. Jody, Suzanne’s daughter and Nelson’s family mouthpiece, said that the closing resulted from waning traffic downtown. People simply weren’t lining up out the door like they once did. While the wind is once again in its sails, downtown Tulsa had deflated, and fewer
offices and businesses meant fewer eaters. This simple numbers game works to explain the closing, but the family rushes through this part of Nelson’s history. They treat the subject like a bad taste in the mouth, rushing to say, “But we’re back open now!” through pasted-on smiles. A member of Nelson’s staff relayed her suspicion of outside investors forcing Nelson out, a detail that could explain the family’s guardedness. If the closing was nonconsensual, Jody’s not talking. Either way, the fry oil went cold and Nelson’s said, “Goodbye, chicken fried.”

The family couldn’t stay away from the restaurant business long. If chicken fried steak runs in the Nelson blood, closing the restaurant felt like losing a limb. In 2009, Nelson Barry Rogers III, Jr.’s son, opened Nelson’s Ranch House at 1547 E. Third St., in the shell of the old Debby’s Ranch House. Jody said, “That was Barry’s thing, Barry’s the one who got that all going.” Tianna Glass has waitressed at Nelson’s Ranch House for three years. When I stopped by to talk with Barry at our arranged time, he was a no-show. Tianna called to see where he was, and they both agreed that she could act as a worthy authority on all things Nelson’s. In between pouring coffee and rolling silverware she proudly assured me, “I probably know all the answers to your questions anyway.”

As we spoke, Tianna stressed two things about the new Nelson’s: the meat and the makers. She boasted that the restaurant still processed its own cube steak for its noteworthy CFS, and that I could see the machine if I wanted. In Nelson’s kitchen they start with fresh cow, cubing the chunks of beef and running them through a press repeatedly to tenderize the meat, until the steaks reach the desired thinness and tenderness. Tianna jumped to tell me about the scandal of Brothers Hooligan beating Nelson’s for the best chicken fried steak in town. “They use frozen patties!” she yelled, although she didn’t mention how she had that information. In truth, Brothers has won the Chicken Fried Steak “Absolute Best in Tulsa Award” from Urban Tulsa for at least the past 3 years that Barry has been in business—hardly a scandal. Melissa Mitchell, a manager at Brothers happily gave me the “low down” on their CFS. She cited freshness as the key to their blue ribbon steak. She said, “Everything is freshly made to order, nothing pre-breaded or anything like that.” Th eirs is the best, she explained, because it’s so tender, “they beat the crap out of it and you can cut it with your fork.” She omitted anything about frozen patties and cheerily listed off the years Brothers has claimed the title over places like Nelson’s.

Yet, as with most everything else, Nelson’s holds onto accolades of the past.

***

To conduct my own trial, I ordered Nelson’s CFS with the customary go-withs: mashed potatoes, gravy, and green beans. I paraded through the signature buffet line, grabbed my loaded plate, and headed to a barstool where I received paper napkin-wrapped utensils and a Styrofoam cup. No one’s trying to be fancy at the Ranch House. With the fi rst bite of steak, I taste the grease before I can even chew. The oil is warm, and the steak tender and juicy. It’s one of those bites that reminds you of your carnivorous heritage. The battering is crispy and crunches with the requisite chomp. I can cut the CFS with the side of my fork—a good testament to its pulverization. The gravy is salty and creamy—neither lumpy thick or watery thin. It’s everything chicken fried steak should be.

I move clockwise to my potatoes, again slathered with cream gravy. Smooth and light white, the potatoes are a bit soupier than I like them. I like mine to have a little more altitude, more Everest than Ozark. So that when they plop, they retain some shape. Nelson’s fall into pool of potato. Not wrong, just not my right. The green beans are soft and floppy and, again, salty. Nelson’s has a way of doing vegetables that wrings every ounce of life from them. I opted for cornbread, rather than a roll, and loaded it with butter. This is neither the time nor the place to skimp on butter. By the time I put down my fork, my stomach is warm, my fingers oily. I’ve just eaten a family heirloom. I feel sated and warm yet strangely enlightened. Somehow, Nelson’s has made an honest dish out of disguised beef.

The breaded steak has always been the Nelson family trophy. Frankly, I can’t imagine ordering anything else on the menu. And to think there was a time you didn’t have a choice.

The original Nelson’s served up one dish per day on a scheduled rotation of specials. If you craved CFS on Monday, too bad. You would have to wait until Thursday. The eatery drew a devout congregation on, say, meatloaf Tuesday, but on chicken fried Thursday patrons crowded the rafters. Despite the success, Grandpa Nelson refused to make the most popular special a fixture on the menu, Tianna said, on account of “superstitions or something.” No longer keeping CFS a daily special, Nelson’s superstition has evolved into religion and you worship by way of the buffet line, where a CFS comes at a $8.69 tithe.

When Tianna started working at Nelson’s, she didn’t understand what she calls the “Hello, chicken fried thing.” “Nobody told me,” she said. She’d hear people yelling salutations to chicken fried and cream gravy and green beans. She said, “I thought they were nicknames. I thought someone was ‘Chicken Fried,’ and somebody else ‘Gravy,’ and somebody else ‘Wheat Rolls.’ ” She finally picked up on the Nelson’s lingo, where “Hello!” is synonymous with “I need.” Now, patrons have joined the choir and walk into the restaurant singing out, “Hello, chicken fried” or “Hello, waitress.” This fosters a restaurant of familiarity, where front-of-house and back-of-house are combined to just house, and the regulars are as comfortable at these tables as they are their own.

Yet, there is a certain missing protocol to the place. If someone on staff is unhappy, you’ll know about it. On my recent trip for lunch, a man in an orange shirt stormed out of the kitchen and said something to the effect of, “I can’t work with him!” Barry, stern but casual, offered, “Well, I’ll fire one of ya.” He does that: babysits, manages, threatens, reminds. He seems calm, but he looks tired. The whole place is kind of sleepy—the wood-paneled walls, the low bar and lower stools, the singular buffet line, the lone cash register, the yellowed pictures and articles on the walls, the staff . The profit margin can’t be much here. The line out the door simply doesn’t exist like in the good ol’ days downtown. The day I dined, the lunch rush came and went within the noon hour. I overheard one waitress say, “It’s been a pretty good day.”

“Oh, God,” Tianna said when I asked how many chicken fried steaks they sold a day, then yelled my question back to one of the line cooks. Three hundred on a slow day, five hundred when they’re busy. If we do the math and allow the Ranch House a very generous three hours of solid lunchtime business, it comes out to dishing around three chicken fried steaks a minute to sell those 500. With only an hour rush on a “good day,” there’s no way Nelson’s puts three steaks on a plate per minute. There’s usually no wait in the buffet line. The server stands idle and waiting, tongs in hand.

The steaks the restaurant does serve, though, feed a crowd that spans the tiny universe that is Tulsa. At Barry’s House, the unemployed sit next to the district attorney. Women in pant suits and patent leather pumps stand in line behind dirty construction workers. The business types are the ones that keep the place running, Tianna told me. She said that some mornings she comes in and there might only be two people in the restaurant paying for their breakfasts. The rest Barry won’t turn away. Their meals are on the house and that’s the way it’s always been. When he can, he puts them to work. During the summer, the sweat-drenched souls toting the Nelson’s lunch board at Third and Peoria and 11th and Utica with varying levels of enthusiasm are working for their meals. If they can get 10–20 people to come in, they’ve paid for those not paying. Tianna said it’s Barry’s way of “stimulating the economy.”

The Rogers folks are just like that. Jody came into Barry’s one day and Tianna complimented her Coach bag. She said she’d never owned one. Weeks later, a package arrived at the place addressed for her. Inside were Coach purses from Jody. Tianna mused, “I think I pawned one.”

Not to be outdone by Barry, Suzanne and her son, Barry’s brother Steven, decided to open their own Nelson’s, which Jody later joined. The new Buffeteria started serving in January at 4401 S. Memorial Drive, even farther from the original downtown birth. Moving away from tried-and-tested Nelson’s territory to reopen may not be a conventional business strategy, but Jody said “it felt right.”

They’d like to go back downtown, Jody and Steven said, but for right now they’ve dressed up Nelson’s and headed south. They talk about the Memorial location as if it’s the “south” of south Tulsa. But really, 44th and Memorial is less minivan suburbia and more Saturday night street races flanked by Mexican restaurants. Jody asked her cashier to describe their clientele. He doesn’t blink. “Senior citizens. Definitely. They always ask for a senior citizen discount.”

Which got me to thinking: Nelson’s is serving the same 1920s heavy cafeteria food in today’s calorie-conscious world. It’s not an everyday place to Tulsans anymore. Women lunching aren’t going to Nelson’s for CFS, mac ’n’ cheese, and meringue pie; they’re picking at salads or wraps and skipping dessert at some airier cafe. Today’s workday lunch is less often the full meal of 30 years ago and more likely eaten at a desk or in a car. Regardless of trends and demographics, both Nelson’s locations serve the same recipes as Grandpa Nelson’s downtown joint. So the seniors flock back to their revered mainstay. But I can’t believe that the clientele is expanding.

Both Nelson’s places offer basically the same food. They boast the original recipes and descendants of the original cooks. A description of the Memorial site’s CFS would be all but indistinguishable from Barry’s. It’s a strange scenario: two different owners from the same family, two different areas of town, two different decors, different managing philosophies … but the same food. Diners aren’t choosing what to eat, but where and how.

The Memorial store is certainly shinier. The black booths look new, and there’s fresh paint and décor and brighter windows. The staff looks busier, but the room strangely quieter. While somebody mops, Suzanne’s in the back, probably making pies or rolls. Jody’s 8-year-old niece is a junior server. The patrons are all 60-plus but the place sure tries to feel young. The environment inches toward hip and cool and current in the newness of the inside space, while the location, menu, clientele, and idea hold it back. There’s a weird tension between old and new here. I finally put my finger on it; it reminds me of a neo-retro diner, the type serving food like gourmet lamb sliders and dark chocolate milkshakes on super high-polished counters. Except you won’t find foodie grub on Nelson’s menu. It isn’t trying to have a twist or be retro. Nelson’s is trying to be the diner, the new original, without really recognizing the change in time.

Jody and Steven’s talk of restoring the original Nelson’s Buffeteria sign somehow says it all. This Nelson’s is fresher than the original and the buffet servers are less testy. They probably won’t tell you to leave if you hesitate seconds before ordering. But, isn’t that part of what made Nelson’s? With the new, something is lost. Like with the sign, Nelson’s is attempting to make the the Memorial location the idea of the original, two things not necessarily the same.

Suzanne, the matriarch, seems to understand the limitation. She said of the original location, “It controlled the business. We couldn’t change anything because the clientele had built it up to what it was. We knew everyone. We knew everyone’s drink. That couldn’t be duplicated. You can’t create that. It takes time and personality.” At some overwhelming point the original Nelson’s restaurant became a character bigger than the authors of the Nelson story. If the current Nelson’s spots feel any bit insincere, it’s because they lack that key ingredient—time. Yet, both locations try to operate as if that old-time familiarity exists in their adolescent ventures, producing a strange irresolution between the past and present.

Both new Nelson’s locations hold the original Nelson’s popularity and success in a death grip, but is it time to let go of the past? Has Tulsa, sadly, become too evolved for Nelson’s? Is downtown too cosmopolitan for beloved gravy-drenched food, and how long will even southeast Tulsa embrace comfort food? What began as a search for good steak became an entry point for considering legacy.

I left the Ranch House and the Buffeteria wondering: Can a dynasty, an institution, a tradition, maintain its success and transcend time and culture, or, like Nelson’s, will there inevitably be decline? Can an idea of the original ever replace the original? Big thoughts for battered steaks, admittedly.

Maybe Nelson Rogers Jr. has figured it all out. I ask where her father is in all this. Jody grinned, “Oh he’s retired; he’s out playing golf.”

Originally published in This Land, Vol. 4, Issue 8. April 15, 2013.

Episode 6: Broken Down Hearted

Show Description:

This week, our heart is in a hole.

Carol Johnson looks to a psychic for comfort. Radioman Jack Campbell feels the silence. Brian “Hashbrown” Calloway falls asleep in his breakfast. Holly Wall day-drinks and tells. Tupelo Hassman remembers Julio de las dos Madres. Singer-songwriter Ramsay Midwood finds there’s more to life than dust in the wind.

Music:

“This Land Theme” by Costa Stasinopoulos
“Fall Moon” by Buildings and Mountains
“Little Tornado” by Aimee Mann
“Harlem Nocturne” by David Rose Orchestra with Woody Herman
“Blue Moon” by Elvis Presley
“Moonlight Serenade” by Glenn Miller Orchestra
“Take Me” by Karen Dalton
“Saddest Songs” by The New Mexican Revolution
“We Are Fine” by Sharon Van Etten
“Rattlesnake” by Ramsay Midwood
“Dust in the Wind” by Kansas
“Esther” by Ramsay Midwood
“Higher Power” by Ramsay Midwood

In the pages of the 1921 Booker T. Washington High School yearbook, long thought lost, are the first images we’ve seen of a man who might be Dick Roland, whose arrest sparked the Tulsa Race Riot. Read more about Roland.

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EXCLUSIVE: Is This the Face of the Man at the Center of the Tulsa Race Riot?

DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH: Diamond in the Rough: On the Trail of the Man at the Center of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921

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EXCLUSIVE: Is This the Face of the Man at the Center of the Tulsa Race Riot?

DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH: Diamond in the Rough: On the Trail of the Man at the Center of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921

His arrest is often referred to as the incident that sparked the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot. Since the Riot, however, his whereabouts and his identity have largely remained a mystery.

* * *

For many years, one of the most sought-after records pertaining to the Tulsa Race Riot was the 1921 yearbook for Booker T. Washington High School in Tulsa, because it was rumored to contain a photo of the never-before-seen “Dick Rowland.” The yearbook had been missing for so long that many researchers stopped looking.

Suddenly, about a year ago, two copies appeared, one at Rudisill Library in Tulsa, and the other at Booker T. Washington High School’s media center. Researcher and This Land contributing editor Steve Gerkin scoured the yearbook in search of the young man at the center of the Riot.

Here’s what Gerkin discovered: In the 1921 yearbook for Booker T. Washington High School, a student named James Jones appears twice—once in a basketball team photo, the other in a “Sophomore-A” class photo.

Damie Roland James claims that her adopted son Dick Roland had been named Jimmie Jones, and that at some point during his school years, her son changed his name to Roland, out of respect for his grandparents Dave and Ollie Roland, who helped raise him in their home. Later, he chose Dick because he liked the name.

There’s a Damie Jones, by the way, who appears in the 1920 census records for Bristow Township, Oklahoma, as a daughter of Dave and Ollie Roland. There’s also a John Roland, aged 16, listed in the 1920 census for Tulsa.

* * *

1921 Booker T. Washington Sophomore “A” Class, where Jones (seated, right) is listed as “James Jones,” and next to his name a description reads, “I Can’t Help it Because I am Tall.” Dick Roland, it was reported, was 5’10″.

1921 Booker T. Washington Basket Ball Boys: According to a hand-inscribed photocopy, Jones is pictured at the center, holding the ball. The player to the right is listed as W.D. Williams, who would later state that he attended school with Dick Roland. The coach pictured at far left is S.E. Williams, the namesake for the football stadium at Booker T. Washington High School.

1921 Booker T. Washington Football Squad, where Jones is listed as “J.W. Jones.”

* * *

In newspaper articles following the riot, Dick Roland became reported as “Diamond Dick Rowland,” the “Diamond” being a flourish added by Roland himself and the “w” in “Rowland” being added by inaccurate reporters.

Booker T. Washington graduate W.D. Williams recalled attending high school with Roland, and claimed that Roland went by the name “Johnny.” Both Williams and Jones appear in the 1921 yearbook—Williams as a junior and Jones as a sophomore. Williams later made the claim that Roland had dropped out of high school to take a job shining shoes, which suggests that maybe Roland shouldn’t be listed in the 1921 yearbook. But Damie Roland claimed her son dropped out of school and returned to school on several occasions.

James Jones the student shared the same name, age, and school as Dick Roland, and yet, unfortunately, there is no direct evidence that connects Jones to Roland with absolute certainty. We don’t know if James Jones was, in fact, Dick Roland. There’s a grave in Tulsa’s Oaklawn Cemetery that reads “James Jones,” and gives a date of birth similar to that of the Booker T. Washington student—but the Jones at Oaklawn died two months before the Riot took place.

Until a new bit of information appears—and a new trove of Riot records has recently been recovered—the fate of Dick Roland remains a mystery.

A wealth of clues suggest that newly discovered images may reveal the young man whose arrest sparked the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot. See more images from the 1921 Booker T. Washington yearbook.

EXCLUSIVE: Diamond in the Rough: On the Trail of the Man at the Center of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921

Secreted out the alley door of the Tulsa County Jail into an awaiting car provided by Sheriff McCollough, Diamond Dick Roland took in the smoldering midday air, while 30 square blocks of Tulsa’s Greenwood District burned to the ground. It was June 1, 1921, and Roland was bound for a suspect destination in Kansas City intended to keep him safe from a vigilante lynch mob. He hid in the backseat. Then, he disappeared forever.

In his absence days later, Roland was represented pro bono by court-appointed attorney Wash Hudson, who was a member of Tulsa’s Ku Klux Klan. Roland was formally charged by a grand jury with intent to rape a 17-year-old white woman named Sarah Page. Newspapers, and many following historical accounts, suggest that Roland’s arrest triggered the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. The perfumed and dapper Mr. Hudson ventured into the charred remains of Greenwood to advise Dick’s mother, Damie Roland Jones, of the situation.

Damie lived in a tent provided by the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce, pitched where her family’s boarding house and Roland’s home once stood at 505 E. Archer in downtown Tulsa, which is a concession stand and centerfield entrance to the Drillers baseball park now. Several months before her death in 1972, the 87-year-old survivor told interviewer Ruth Avery that she saw Dick one more time following his disappearance. There are no certifiable accounts of him returning to Tulsa. Damie claimed he had gained weight from the jail food, and had the stench of a man who had hitched a ride in a train car. She said he cried to her, “Look what I have done,” and left before dawn to avoid detection by angry survivors.

Roland was rumored to have moved north. Possibly working at Unity Bindery and living in an industrial neighborhood just east of downtown, a “Richard Roland” vanished from the Kansas City, Missouri, public records in 1926. Damie stated Dick wrote that Page was still “bumming around Kansas City,”suggesting that Roland not only knew Sarah Page, but that they were familiar. There is no census or directory information that Page actually lived in the metropolis. The Great Depression was on the horizon and work was drying up. Damie says that Roland wrote of an interest to see the shores of Oregon, seeking employment in the shipyards.

A “Richard Rowland” appeared in the Portland directory in that time period, working in a mattress factory. Living in the black community of Albina, a segregated community on the outskirts of downtown, Rowland would have felt the full force of the Jim Crow environment so prevalent in Oregon. Sundown laws made it illegal for blacks to be in Portland after sundown, so they formed their own community, now known as the Albina District of Portland. Later census data proved this Richard Rowland was a white man. Yet thousands of nameless blacks lived along the Columbia River supporting the ship building industry.

Shipbuilding outside Portland was a huge industry in the ‘20s and ‘30s. The Henry Kaiser Shipyards expanded in anticipation of WWII needs and conducted nationwide advertisements for jobs. A hundred thousand people flocked to Oregon—many of them blacks. Kaiser built an entire community including a housing development, schools, and a hospital for 6,000 of his black workers who were not wanted in Portland. This settlement became Vanport. On Memorial Day, 1948, the Columbia River swelled 15 feet above flood level, wiping out the complex. Lives were lost, swallowed up by the torrents. Maybe that Rowland was among the nameless swept towards the Pacific.

The only Richard Rowland on the Oregon death rolls turned out to be a six-year-old boy, who lived his life in the Fairview Home (formerly known as the Oregon State Institute for Feeble Minded) and after his tragic death was buried in a state cemetery in Marion County south of Portland. Evidence has since surfaced that places another Richard Rowland closer to Tulsa.

He may be resting in an all-black cemetery in Topeka, Kansas. Enforced segregation caused the creation of Mount Auburn Cemetery that also was the burial ground for impoverished whites. Black veterans from seven different wars lie in proximity to a Richard Rowland. The records of Hall-Diffenderfer Funeral Home show him to be in the Crittenton lot. Born Richard Dean Rowland in the black Florence Crittenton Home, this child died at birth on June 3, 1936. The Dick Roland of Tulsa remained missing without a trace.

Although history books often refer to him as “Dick Rowland,” the man at the center of the Riot had several names. He was first called “Jimmie Jones” and, per census records, became “John Roland” when he and Damie moved in with her parents, Dave and Ollie Roland, after 1910. Their name is misspelled as “Rolland” and “Rowland” in various census and Tulsa Directories. In most news reports following the riot, Dick’s last name was spelled “Rowland.” According to Damie, when Jimmie entered Booker T. Washington High School he changed his first name to Dick because he liked the name. Roland was a classmate of well-known educator W.D. Williams, who told legislator Don Ross in his publication Impact, June 1971, that Roland’s friends called him Johnny. Yet, the 1921 Booker T. Washington yearbook shows him as “James Jones” and “J. W. Jones.”

Dick Roland may be close by. In Tulsa’s Oaklawn Cemetery at 11^th and Peoria, the Roland family plot has headstones for everyone but Dick: his uncle Clarence, Clarence’s daughter Earlene Roland Morris, and his grandparents Dave and Ollie, along with Damie Roland Ford and her husband Clifford Ford. According to Shadows of the Past: Tombstone Inscriptions, in an adjacent section is a small headstone cryptically inscribed “James Jones (18 years old), 1921,” curiously matching Jimmy’s age and year he vanished and the year of the Riot. That James Jones, however, died in March of 1921—two months before Roland would’ve been arrested. According to the headstone located a mere ten yards from the Roland plot, James Jones was “Gone But Not Forgotten”

Post riot, the media gave him the derogatory name of Diamond Dick, stemming from the small diamond ring he wore—a birthday present given to himself from tips earned at his boot black job near the Drexel Building in downtown Tulsa. The Drexel had a jerky elevator, where Roland once tripped, nearly fell, and grabbed the arm of the operator, Sarah Page, who was by then a good and intimate friend, according to Tulsa Race Riot historian Eddie Faye Gates. The discomfort from Dick’s hand, reportedly caused the feisty dishwater blonde to shriek and yell at Roland, which alarmed a Renberg’s clothing store salesman. The salesman fabricated a wrongful tale passed onto authorities and yellow journalists.

When the Riot started, Roland was no longer on Tulsa’s mind.

The charge against Roland was thrown out due to County Attorney William Seaver’s wrongful inclusion of assault in the charge and an alleged victim who never considered herself to be one. The demurer of his charges in September 1921 and its signature, spelled “Dick Roland,” was signed either in absentia or by the real man—no way to tell; there is no record of him being in Tulsa. Maybe he was already dead.

Perhaps Roland was in a “safe” jail at an undocumented location or became just another dead black man floating in the Arkansas River. Or perhaps he was placed on a flat bed truck alongside other Riot corpses, or he may have been disposed in a rural setting towards Kansas City. Maybe he was hung in the gallows on his county jail cell floor and was carried out the alley door to his final resting place. Whatever happened to the man, when the Riot started, Roland was no longer on Tulsa’s mind. Maybe his mother’s dementia-like ramblings to interviewer Ruth Avery were just a mother’s fantasy that kept her son alive, creating a peaceful memory in her last days.

“I have lost my only boy,” lamented Damie.

---

Originally published in This Land, Vol. 4, Issue 9. May 1, 2013.

EXCLUSIVE: Is This the Face of the Man at the Center of the Tulsa Race Riot?

A wealth of clues suggest that newly discovered images may reveal the young man whose arrest sparked the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot. See more images from the 1921 Booker T. Washington yearbook.

]]> http://thislandpress.com/05/08/2013/diamond-in-the-rough/feed/ 0 http://thislandpress.com/05/06/2013/the-b-side/ http://thislandpress.com/05/06/2013/the-b-side/#comments Mon, 06 May 2013 13:00:49 +0000 Bryonia Liggins http://thislandpress.com/?p=32721 Since April is National Poetry Month, we’re pleased to run poems by a pair of younger writers who participated in …

]]> Since April is National Poetry Month, we’re pleased to run poems by a pair of younger writers who participated in the Louder Than A Bomb-Tulsa competition back in February.

Both Nick Weaver and Bryonia Liggins were on the winning team for LTAB-Tulsa 2013. Both were also, therefore, awarded a trip to Chicago last month, during which they attended workshops at Young Chicago Authors and competed in a national match representing Tulsa. Team Tulsa placed second overall in that national match. This is how “Howl for Me” came to be performed for an audience that included Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. And for the record: LTAB-Tulsa 2013 was the third such event to occur here in T-Town, and also the biggest yet. It’s a pleasure to recognize this very cool, very poetry-friendly happening in our community, and especially to feature two fine poems that came out of it. —Scott Gregory, Poetry Editor of This Land.

---

I close my eyes, and let my ears govern my senses wholly.
The first track is always the sweetest
Obliviously escorting you into a new world
Unheard of
Fast paced and unpredictable
Always the one you remember
Always the one you try to forget
Repeat
Repeat
Repeat
It’s time to move on
The first track’s been played too many times for your own comfort
It no longer belongs to just you
It never did
The second track:
It’s good
not great
but you pretend it’s better than the first
you settle
lie to yourself
and claim it’s the best thing you’ve ever heard
You’re not fooling anyone
but you remain content
you have to
Track Number 3
so
Smooth
and
Captivating
forces you to do the unspeakable
you’re ashamed
but regret nothing….

The next track
Effortlessly steals your soul from the beginning
You don’t want it back
You don’t need it back
It’s in good hands
Can manage it better than you ever could
Life has never been better
You reach the chorus
And realize you’re not the only one
There was another
There was always another
An ungodly collaboration you were interrupting

Your soul crippled and tainted
Is given back
You didn’t deserve to be disappointed
After all the time you’ve dedicated to strictly listening
Not talking
Just listening

It’s time to talk
When you do
You’ll be ready to flip
And Side B will be waiting to be heard and for you to sing along to every word.

---

Bryonia Liggins is a junior at Holland Hall. She’s been writing for her school newspaper for about five years. She was born and raised in Tulsa and hopes to become a screenwriter.

Originally published in This Land, Vol. 4, Issue 8. April 15, 2013.

]]> http://thislandpress.com/05/06/2013/the-b-side/feed/ 0 http://thislandpress.com/05/03/2013/episode-5-god-and-country/ http://thislandpress.com/05/03/2013/episode-5-god-and-country/#comments Fri, 03 May 2013 21:00:02 +0000 This Land http://thislandpress.com/?p=32702 In a special edition of This Land Radio, we go back to Cold War Oklahoma.

Lee Roy Chapman and Michael Mason tell the story of preacher Billy James Hargis and his unlikely partnership with Major General Edwin Walker. Becky Frank remembers her dad. James Bond (not that James Bond) endorses from the pulpit, and Holly Wall puts it in perspective. Sterlin Harjo and Matt Leach season the show with some Strangelove.

More in This Land:

The Strange Love of Dr Billy James Hargis by Lee Roy Chapman and Michael Mason
Backwards Christian Soldier by Russell Cobb
The Watchman on the Wall by Stanton Doyle

 

Related Links:

The Sins of Billy James in TIME magazine (must be a subscriber).

 

Music:

“Military March” by Alastair Cameron
“Naked Lunch”
“Guitar Boogie” by Arthur Smith
“Cosmic Tape I”
“ODD”
“Absence of Day and Night 12″
“Cosmogonia Semplice”
“Take Off and Shoot a Zero”
Sea Clic
“Hesperos”
“The Beekeeper Jaggers Theme” by Tom Fahy
“First Rays”
“Razorback Sucker”
Naked Lunch

]]> http://thislandpress.com/05/03/2013/episode-5-god-and-country/feed/ 1 Billy James Hargis, Cold War, Evangelism, Dr. Strangelove, Oklahoma, preachers In a special edition of This Land Radio, we go back to Cold War Oklahoma. Lee Roy Chapman and Michael Mason tell the story of preacher Billy James Hargis and his unlikely partnership with Major General Edwin Walker. Becky Frank remembers her dad. James Bond (not that James Bond) endorses from the pulpit, and Holly Wall puts it in perspective. Sterlin Harjo and Matt Leach season the show with some Strangelove. This Land no 53:21 http://thislandpress.com/05/03/2013/howl-for-me/ http://thislandpress.com/05/03/2013/howl-for-me/#comments Fri, 03 May 2013 12:00:18 +0000 Nick Weaver http://thislandpress.com/?p=32538 Since April is National Poetry Month, we’re pleased to run poems by a pair of younger writers who participated in …

]]> Since April is National Poetry Month, we’re pleased to run poems by a pair of younger writers who participated in the Louder Than A Bomb-Tulsa competition back in February.

Both Nick Weaver and Bryonia Liggins were on the winning team for LTAB-Tulsa 2013. Both were also, therefore, awarded a trip to Chicago last month, during which they attended workshops at Young Chicago Authors and competed in a national match representing Tulsa. Team Tulsa placed second overall in that national match. This is how “Howl for Me” came to be performed for an audience that included Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. And for the record: LTAB-Tulsa 2013 was the third such event to occur here in T-Town, and also the biggest yet. It’s a pleasure to recognize this very cool, very poetry-friendly happening in our community, and especially to feature two fine poems that came out of it. —Scott Gregory, Poetry Editor of This Land.

---

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
news feeds, direct messages and status updates,
hysterically dragging themselves through the cyber streets at dawn,
begging for a retweet, they scream staccato keystrokes like Facebook junkies.

Us Instagram hipsters are hashtag angry and hashtag hungry
Us gamers go wild for hits of mountain dew code red,
the Bacchanalian love found during a Warcraft raid,
hypnotized by our avatars, our keyboards are STD free
but our porn-soaked minds define scenes
our parents didn’t want to.

Because we are lonely for someone to check our checkins,
be the 2nd 3rd and 4th parties in our Foursquares
because we want you to know where we are
and we want you to like us and like us for liking you,
and we want you to notice when we’re not at home.

I saw the eyes of my peers turn dark, dimmed from an app store glow,
they draw something until they exhaust the ink supplies in their fingertips
they play words with friends until they have neither.

We stopped sacrificing to Moloch
after children became the Canaanites,
the fire gods lace themselves between the notches in our spines,
we build funeral pyres for reality TV,
and we bleed for Greenwood when we write our blog posts,
but we can’t call that blood our own.

Because on every street in every suburb you will find us among the front lawns,
watching the stars, searching for something red in the sky
because it’s been so long since we’ve seen something truly red,
it’s been so long since something red has belonged to us and not the neighborhood,
that we can’t even lay claim to the history in our veins anymore.

Because I wonder where the rebels have gone.

Because I wonder where the stories have gone,
and the Canaanite memories,
and the Byzantine laughs,
and the breakfasts you didn’t feel the need to document.

Because really we don’t want you to listen to our quotes,
or our reviews,
we want you to listen to our howls.
We want you to scroll down to the comments section of our youth,
and reply to all the questions left unanswered,

And open up, “an epilogue of our lives dot tumblr dot com,”
and it will be free for anyone to follow,
and one day in the future,
it won’t be full of all the words we never said
but the explosive TNT
of a million voices you’ve never heard before.

I wanna detonate my online presence
and leave the trench that I dug in my browser behind,
I wanna join my generation in deleting our eHarmony profiles,
and find love with someone that I can be a monster with.

Because I want to be a werewolf, a pack animal
I want to join my brothers’ DNA,
cursing and foaming at the mouth,
we will tear into the chests and rip open the hearts of anyone who will bare them to us,
and we’ll find passion and compassion,
we’ll find the battlefield and the beachhead,
we will find the stories again,
and we will lift them up to the cosmos,
dripping and wet, clenched between our jaws,
we will show our pain to the world and we will show the world they still have heroes.

Because there’s a full moon coming,
and it’s gonna be blood red.
So howl for me.

---

NICK WEAVER is a writer from Tulsa. He’s a senior at Holland Hall School and writes for the school paper. He was the youngest performer at the 18th Annual Living Arts Poetry Slam.

Originally published in This Land, Vol. 4 Issue 8. April 15, 2013.

]]> http://thislandpress.com/05/03/2013/howl-for-me/feed/ 2 http://thislandpress.com/05/02/2013/guide-oklahoma-farmers-markets-a-few-of-our-favorites/ http://thislandpress.com/05/02/2013/guide-oklahoma-farmers-markets-a-few-of-our-favorites/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 19:02:01 +0000 Natasha Ball http://thislandpress.com/?p=32667 Wanna get fresh? Use our list of Oklahoma farmers markets to find the best and freshest produce—along with some one-of-a-kind …

]]> Wanna get fresh? Use our list of Oklahoma farmers markets to find the best and freshest produce—along with some one-of-a-kind curios and crafts—from around the state.

Tulsa-Area Farmers Markets

• Bartlesville Farmer’s Market. Saturdays, May-October. Frank Phillips Park, Bartlesville. Bartlesville Farmer’s Market
• Market on Main. Saturdays, April-September. 418 South Main Street, Broken Arrow. Market on Main
• Farmers Market on Cherry Street. Saturdays on Cherry Street, Wednesdays on Brookside. 15th Street between Utica and Peoria; 41st and Peoria. Cherry Street Farmers Market
• Owasso Farmers Market. Wednesdays and Saturdays. OWasso YMCA parking lot. Owasso Farmers Market

Oklahoma City-Area Farmers Markets

• OSU-OKC Farmers Market. Saturdays. OSU-OKC Campus. OSU-OKC Farmers Market.
• Eastern Oklahoma County Farmers Market. Saturdays, June-October. Choctaw Creek Park, Choctaw. Easter Oklahoma County Farmers Market.
• Edmond Farmers Market. Saturdays, April-October except the first weekend of May. Festival Market Place, Edmond. Edmond Farmers Market.
• Stillwater Farmers Market. Wednesdays and Saturdays. Pioneer Square, Stillwater. Stillwater Farmers Market.
• Norman Farmers Market. Saturdays and Wednesday, Cleveland County Fairgrounds, Norman. Norman Farmers Market.

Other Oklahoma Farmers Markets

• Guthrie Farmers and Crafters Market. Saturdays, June-September. First Street between Oklahoma and Harrison, Guthrie. Guthrie Farmers and Crafters Market
• Guymon Farmers Market. Saturdays, July-September. In front of the courthouse on Main Street, Guymon. Guymon Farmers Market
• Lawton Farmers Market. Wednesdays and Saturdays. Comanche County Fairgrounds. Lawton Farmers Market

]]> http://thislandpress.com/05/02/2013/guide-oklahoma-farmers-markets-a-few-of-our-favorites/feed/ 0 http://thislandpress.com/05/02/2013/guide-best-may-festivals-and-other-things-to-do-in-oklahoma/ http://thislandpress.com/05/02/2013/guide-best-may-festivals-and-other-things-to-do-in-oklahoma/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 13:24:28 +0000 Natasha Ball http://thislandpress.com/?p=32610 Festivals are stories we tell about ourselves. When you attend a festival in Oklahoma, though your fingers might be sticky …

]]> Festivals are stories we tell about ourselves. When you attend a festival in Oklahoma, though your fingers might be sticky with powdered sugar from a shared funnel cake, and you might be wearing a viking helmet besides, you are taking part in an important storytelling endeavor.

We build our festivals on that one thing we’re known for, the tagline on the signs we hammer into the ground alongside the roads that lead into town: The way we remember the times, places, foods, songs, and dances of our ancestors. The strawberry-sweet, rich soil under our feet, the same stuff our grandparents tilled with a plow. Our passion for sports, or our traditions (and new interests) in music. Even the time a big-talkin’ man came to town, sold us a circus, and then skipped town.

From King Henry VIII to endless spaghetti, here are our top picks for festivals on the calendar for May in Oklahoma.

Food Festivals

Just like everything else here in Oklahoma—highways, linguistics, regional identity, even the air (we aren’t home to the premier meteorology school in the U.S. for nothing)—our food culture represents an amalgam, a hurried smashing together of traditions as varied as those represented in America itself, but within a much tighter time frame. When you dig in to our official state meal—that’s chicken-fried steak, fried okra, squash, cornbread, barbecue pork, black-eyed peas, biscuits, sausage and gravy, grits, corn, strawberries, and pecan pie—each morsel represents a micro version of the macro, with the fast-forward button mashed down.

Spring brings the opportunity to dip your toe (or your fork, as it were) into some of our state’s most illustrious traditions in eating and drinking, still separate and distinct from one another from not having had time for much mingling. Consider it your personal historical preservation project when you fill your belly at one of the following food festivals.

TULSA: Germanfest. Ever see the crowning of an Okie Maikönigin? Germanfest in Tulsa is where the May Queen is presented with a three-day festival of folk dancing, polka, and easily 10 times her weight in jägerschnitzel, kartoffelpuffer, and sauerkraut. It’s also a chance to stock up on accoutrements much missed from the old country, from candy and pastries to wall hangings and home décor. May 3-5. More about Tulsa’s Germanfest.

EL RENO: El Reno Fried Onion Burger Day. In 1988, the people of El Reno took burger love to a whole new level. That was the year they built a 12-foot convection oven and a 10-foot circular grill. The stunt was designed to highlight the town’s fried-onion hamburger heritage, lauded today with a 850-pound burger at the annual El Reno Fried Onion Burger Day festival. May 4. More about El Reno Fried Onion Burger Day.

PRAGUE: Prague Kolache Festival. Kolache, n.: A fluffy, sweet roll crowned with a dollop of filling, usually fruit, prized in Czech culture and, increasingly, pretty much everyone else with a half-decent set of taste buds. The pastry serves as the centerpiece of the Prague Kolache Festival, which takes over the central-Oklahoma town of Prague (pronounced PRAYg) each year during the first weekend of May. Brush up on your chicken dance, and you’ll blend in like a local. May 4. More about the Prague Kolache Festival.

STILWELL: Stilwell Strawberry Festival. Some of the sweetest fruit you’ve ever tasted swells on shoots of vines curling out from the soil of Adair County. The strawberries there are celebrated every year in the heart of Stilwell with a festival, first held a few years after the close of the Second World War. May 11. More about the Stilwell Strawberry Festival.

BRISTOW: Tabouleh Fest. Start with Route 66, just south of Tulsa. Add a rodeo, a pageant, and a sanctioned, timed running through the streets. Then stir in a hearty helping of bulgar wheat, some olive oil, lemon juice, tomatoes, and some fresh parsley. The city attracted several Lebanese families to settle there about a hundred years ago, and this street party is their way of celebrating that heritage and their long-running establishments, like the Bishop Brothers Taboli factory and Slyman’s Lebanese Foods. May 11. More about Bristow’s Tabouleh Fest.

BRISTOW: Nuyaka Creek Winery Spring Wine Festival. Stain your lips with the latest elderberry vintage and chase it with a shot of fortified wine of Oklahoma pecan. Admission is free; the tasting glass is $5. May 18. More about the Nuyaka Creek Winery Spring Wine Festival.

MCALESTER: McAlester Italian Festival. When even the website is written in Italian, you know a food festival is the real deal. Such is the case with the McAlester Italian Festival. May 18-19. More about the McAlester Italian Festival.

Music Festivals

We sure do like the sound of our own voices around here, especially in a melody. Find more music events in your area at ThisLandPress.com/Events, under Music & Nightlife.

ENID: Tri-State Music Festival. Complementary—and sometimes rival to—football fandom in Oklahoma is the cult of marching band. The state is home to bands with multiple national titles, and this festival, dating back to 1932, shows how deep the roots of love Oklahomans have for a band that can play the classics of John Philip Sousa (along with the Beatles and Journey) on tiptoe really run. May 1-4. More about the Tri-State Music Festival.

PRUE: Backwoods Bash & Music Festival. The Backwoods Bash has been helping citizens of Green Country make the most of a holiday weekend for half a decade, bringing headlining acts like The Werks, the Gourds, Split Lip Rayfield, and dozens of local bands to play working folks all the way through Memorial Day weekend to Tuesday morning. There’s the music, and then there’s the camping—plus, the festival packs a kids’ zone, complete with Jupiter Jumps, a drum clinic, and a build-your-own kite and hula hoop workshops. May 24-26. More about the Backwoods Bash & Music Festival.

PRYOR: Rocklahoma. Camping. A beauty pageant. Four days of rock, rain or shine (which is really saying something when you’re talking about an outdoor party during storm season in the heart of tornado alley). The festival that does wonders for the population size of Pryor, Oklahoma—and does a real number on one of its largest pastures—serves up headliners from the highest echelons of rock, counting Rob Zombie, Chickenfoot, Creed, Megadeath, and Slash among its past performers. This year, it’s Guns N’ Roses, Bush, Papa Roach, Alice in Chains, Bullet for My Valentine, Korn, Cheap Trick, and dozens more. May 24-26. More about Rocklahoma.

SKIATOOK: Tallgrass Music Festival. Drive north out of Tulsa and you’ll eventually cross the line into Osage County, where the area’s major natural wonder will begin to spread and fold under the horizon around you. The Tallgrass Prairie is the feature for which the Tallgrass Music Festival, a celebration of roots music geared for families, is named and celebrated. May 30-June 1. More about the Tallgrass Music Festival.

Arts Festivals

We Oklahomans are an artsy bunch. More details on these arts festivals and, if you can believe it, more, at ThisLandPress.com/Events, under Art & Theatre.

TULSA: Tulsa International Mayfest. A juried showcase of artists from across the nation serves as the centerpiece of Mayfest, which takes over Main Street of downtown Tulsa from Third to Sixth streets for a few days every May. Myriad fried foods on a stick and musicians plucked from Oklahomans’ local-favorites list will have run of one of the most beautiful areas of the city, including headliners Monte Montgomery, John Fullbright, Royal Southern Brotherhood, Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit, Will Hoge, and Uncle Lucius. May 16-19. More about Tulsa International Mayfest.

TULSA: Blue Dome Arts Festival. While the long-running Mayfest features artists from all over the U.S., the smaller and younger Blue Dome Arts Festival showcases the handiwork of more than 200 of Oklahoma’s artists and crafters, pairing their works in jewelry, fashion, and home decor with an impressive lineup of local bands and food from restaurants and trucks favored by Tulsa’s cool class. Home of belly dancers, pottery demos, free homebrew tastings, and Tulsa’s famous ArtCar Weekend and the Art BoxCar Children’s Parade. May 17-19. More about the Blue Dome Arts Festival.

OKC: Paseo Arts Festival. The tiny, beloved arts district known as The Paseo fills to the brim during its annual arts festival, when more than 80 street vendors, artists, artisans, and craftworkers—not to mention the 17 galleries and three restaurants that call the district home—flood the streets to peddle handmade pretties and eats. May 25-27. More about the Paseo Arts Festival.

More May Oklahoma Festivals

Festivals galore. From wine to mead and wind riders to belly crawlers, find a list of our favorite Oklahoma festivals and ThisLandPress.com/Events, under Do This.

MUSKOGEE: Oklahoma Renaissance Festival. Heckle the professional jousters in the tournament arena at the Oklahoma Renaissance Festival, one of the top festivals of its kind in the country. The venue is The Castle of Muskogee—complete with crenellations and flags waving from the towers—which got its start as a bar-turned-fireworks stand. Every Saturday and Sunday, May 4-June 2. More the about Oklahoma Renaissance Festival.

OKEENE: Okeene Diamondback Rattlesnake Hunt. In 1939, Orville Von Gulker, a sales manager at Okeene Milling Company, started a tradition. Seeing that the annual chore of ridding the cow pastures of poisonous reptiles could be turned into a generator for tourism, he helped put together one of the first rattlesnake round-ups in the country—perhaps, even, the first in the world. May 3-5. More about the Okeene Diamondback Rattlesnake Hunt.

TULSA: Tulsa Windriders Kite Club Festival. You have your four-pointed, long-tailed kites, your fighter kites, and your box kites at the Tulsa Wind Riders Kite Festival, sure. But there are also full-grown men capturing the Oklahoma wind with giant kites, tied to vehicles that are sort of like go-carts. A must-see. May 11-12. More about the Tulsa Windriders Kite Club Festival.

POTEAU: Cavanal Killer Walk. There are mountains in Oklahoma. In fact, we have four ranges’ worth. But make no mistake—our state is home to a doozy of a hill, too. At 1,999 feet, the lofty Cavanal Hill—it’s said that it is the world’s highest—looms over Poteau. Every May, runners and walkers stage a pilgrimage to the town that is about a two-hour drive south of Tulsa to attempt the intense five-mile climb. May 11. More about Cavanal Killer Walk.

BROKEN ARROW: Rooster Days Festival. There’s no rooster to be found at Broken Arrow’s Rooster Days, since there’s no longer a need to annually expel roosters from hen houses to yield the freshest, unfertilized eggs (which tended to keep longer before the days of Maytag and Kenmore). But there’s still a parade, performances by professional cloggers, and a 5K run, plus a music festival, Ferris wheel rides, and the crowning of Miss Chick. May 10-12. More about the Rooster Days Festival.

OKC: OKC Gay Pride Festival & Parade. Two square blocks are cordoned off for a pride celebration that starts early and goes into the wee hours of the morning, celebrating diversity and advocating for health, education, and awareness in the Oklahoma City metro. May 17-19. More about the OKC Gay Pride Festival & Parade.

BARNSDALL: Bigheart Day. There is no shortage of Oklahoma communities that produce festivals based on how they’re the home of the biggest burger, the largest peanut, the biggest small-town scam. In Barnsdall, though, what’s biggest is the heart. May 24-26. More about Big Heart Day.

So. What are you planning to get up to in Oklahoma this month?

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]]> http://thislandpress.com/05/02/2013/guide-best-may-festivals-and-other-things-to-do-in-oklahoma/feed/ 0 http://thislandpress.com/05/02/2013/inside-the-abattoir/ http://thislandpress.com/05/02/2013/inside-the-abattoir/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 12:00:44 +0000 James McGirk http://thislandpress.com/?p=32545 Chevideco, the Belgian horse meat conglomerate, touts a single story in its press section: a taste test held at a …

]]> Chevideco, the Belgian horse meat conglomerate, touts a single story in its press section: a taste test held at a west London home was arranged by Sir Peter Bazalgette, who writes a column for the Financial Times and chairs Britain’s Arts Council. Sir Peter blindfolded his guests and grilled ten frozen burger patties. He fed them meat “on its own with no buns, salad or relish.” The horse was a hit, deemed, “substantial with an authentic whiff of offal,” and “with the mild, gratifying flavour of liver,” placing second overall in the patty rankings. Sir Peter’s guests were informed in advance that one of the patties would be made of horse meat, yet it is hard to imagine the scene without gothic accoutrements: the blindfolded diners sitting at a long table in a gloomy mansion, the host at the head of the table holding a sizzling pan, a clap of thunder, leering portraits, a sliver of mysterious meat raised on the tines of a fork. Chevideco unwittingly ups the menace by emphasizing the last line of the article, which reads: “[the exotic meat company that provided the horse meat] promises none of its horse burgers has been contaminated with beef.”

The beef burger has a sinister history in the United Kingdom. Not so long ago, in the 1990s, Britons worried their entire beef-eating population might succumb to an incurable degenerative brain disorder known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), which had been introduced by feeding beef cattle a protein-rich slurry that included infected bovine spinal tissue (in cattle this condition is known as mad cow disease). The disaster never came to pass. Only 175 human cases were confi rmed in the United Kingdom and another 49 abroad between 1986 and 2011, but millions of cattle had to be destroyed. Realizing in January 2013 that much of its supply was laced with horse meat reawakened old anxieties for beef-eating Englishmen.

The English, like us Americans, have a long tradition of separating animals into edible, wild, and companion categories. To an average Englishman, the horse is a gentle, friendly, magnificent creature—about as far from a burger as you could possibly get. You can even make the case that the English are more attached to animals than we are. They regularly descend en masse on small Spanish villages to protest cruel customs— most famously in 1986 when, riled up by Rupert Murdoch’s notorious tabloid The Star (then calling itself the “kindest newspaper to animals”), a group of Britons saved “Blackie” the burro from being crushed by the town drunk in a symbolic re-enactment of a rapist’s execution in Villanueva de la Vera’s annual village festival. Elsewhere in Europe and Asia, however, a history rich in famine has forced more adventurous cuisine. Outside of the Anglo-American sphere, horse is actually considered a clean meat, a substitute for beef free from bovine growth hormone and menaces like the brain-melting prions responsible for vCJD.

American horse meat actually commands a premium in Europe, where cowboys-and-Indians comics are sold at newsstands, and the Wild West carries romantic connotations. Prime cuts of horse in Paris, according to the ASPCA, can reach prices up to to $20 a pound (a pound of ground beef goes for about $11.20). Google the Belgian comic “Lucky Luke,” for a glimpse of it.

The supply of American horse meat has dwindled since the last three American plants were closed down in 2007. Peak output hit 350,000 horses a year in 1990. Last year between 130,000 and 160,000 horses were shipped out of the United States to plants in Canada or Mexico. Canadian plants led horses down a track, held them in a head harness, a shot them with a bolt gun, which uses a blank round to force a wide metal rod through a horse’s skull, destroying its brain. Occasionally they’ll use a rifle. Mexican slaughterhouses range from ones built to European standards to smaller, completely unregulated municipal slaughterhouses. There, horses are hoisted in the air and their throats repeatedly jabbed with a puntilla knife, a cruel double-sided dagger.

* * *

Horses are sensitive creatures. Families of them gallop together in the wild, roaming hundreds of miles to forage for food and water. To keep one stabled is extremely expensive. To buy one at auction, assuming you aren’t buying a descendant of Secretariat, might cost anywhere from a hundred to several thousand dollars, depending on the horse’s age, condition, and training. Then you have to feed it. A horse can easily weigh over a 1,000 lbs and requires about 1.5 percent of its bodyweight in hay per day. Then you have to shelter it—that’s another couple of hundred dollars a month—buy riding equipment, pay for transportation, training, vet care, shoes from a farrier… and so on. Usually, horse ownership costs range from $2,000-$5,000 a year, about the same as a nice car. Horses are a luxury item, a status symbol people strive for, and often overextend themselves trying to afford—particularly when feed prices climb and the economy dips. Sometimes an owner is forced to sacrifice a horse to keep a herd. Euthanasia is expensive. Even doing it yourself with a shotgun slug can mean expensive disposal fees. Desperate owners abandon horses, dooming them to death by starvation. Slaughter could help an owner make a little money, though a thriving market for horseflesh (currently hovering around 35 cents a pound wholesale) would encourage thieves.

Even if you don’t own a horse, in a sense, you do. The Bureau of Land Management cares for tens of thousands of burros and wild mustangs (the feral descendants of escaped horses) on your behalf. Great herds of them thunder through federal lands in Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, and Nevada. But they compete with cattle ranchers for food, nibbling grasses down to bare earth, and since they have few natural enemies, are considered a nuisance. The BLM trims their numbers every year, herding them by helicopter and carting them off to short-term holding pens in places like Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, where they’re trained and sold for $125 a head. “Kill buying” wild horses is officially prohibited but hard to police. There are “whispers” that BLM-branded horses are often spotted in trailers, crossing the border into Mexico. Madeleine Pickens (former wife of Oklahoma-born billionaire T. Boone Pickens and owner of the Del Mar Country Club) has purchased 900 square miles of ranch-land in Elko, Nevada, to create what she hopes will become Mustang Monument: a private foundation that would adopt and maintain wild mustangs from the BLM and allow Americans to reclaim their Western heritage in a luxurious setting. She’s fought passionately for horses’ rights and says allowing slaughter “would be a black mark” on Oklahoma’s already soiled reputation for animal rights. Few Oklahomans want horse slaughter, she says; the movement for it is the result of lobbying by the powerful “Ag industry,” including the Belgian conglomerates.

* * *

Temple Grandin, the autistic social scientist made famous by Oliver Sacks’ Anthropologist from Mars, (currently employed as an animal science professor at Colorado State University) claims her inability to think in a symbolic language gives her special insight into a herd animal’s consciousness. “My memories and the horses’ memories are like photos stored in a computer. Or audio clips,” she writes. Her simple recommendations given from an animal’s point of view (such as using non-slip surfaces for animals to walk on, minimizing frightening sights and sounds and gently curving walkways) have helped slaughterhouses develop humane killing methods and process their livestock more efficiently.

According to Grandin, a horse and cow experience stress in a similar way. (If anything, horses are more spirited than cows, since they aren’t bred to be docile.) Both are animals of flight, herd animals ready to bolt the moment they see a predator, and are afraid of sudden sounds and unfamiliar sights. Restraint and isolation are particularly terrifying. She points to blood cortisol levels taken from tissue after slaughter as an index of stress that a cow experiences during different kill methods [1]. These range from 15 ng/mL for a cow killed by a captive bolt system in a quiet research facility (about the level of stress a young cow experiences during normal handling) to 93 ng/mL, extreme stress, for an animal who was inverted on its back for 103 seconds before being killed. The latter is about the comfort-level of a horse hoisted and gutted in an unregulated Mexican plant. A noisy, slippery commercial plant boosted animals’ average cortisol count to 63 ng/mL, slightly below what was measured in sheep—another herd animal—after shearing and “other farm procedures” such as castration and branding. Quieter plants with better floors resulted in cortisol levels between 24-51 ng/mL—the latter number for a plant with a “poorly designed head restraint” that only 14 percent of animals would have entered willingly. In 1998 on behalf of the USDA/APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service) Temple Grandin surveyed two American horse slaughter plants in Texas. She watched 1,008 horses arrive at the plant, seventy-eight of which arrived with “severe welfare problems.” These included a bucking bronco with a broken leg, horses wounded from fighting during transit, plus severely malnourished and foundered horses, which refers to a degenerative condition affecting a horse’s hooves. Sixty out of the seventy-eight were neglected by their owners and the other eighteen were afflicted during transport, such as one horse who leapt from a double trailer and fell on the ramp below. In other words, these weren’t all nags. Another survey of hers, this time of a horse auction in Pennsylvania, revealed a further 12.5 percent of horses exhibited bad behaviors—like extreme fear, aggression, bucking, and rearing—that made them undesirable as riding or draft horses. Grandin recommended then and continues to recommend that American horse slaughterhouses be kept open and strictly regulated by the USDA to prevent animals from going to unregulated Mexican municipal slaughterhouses. Of course, all commercial slaughter is an ugly business up close. But the reason why the Texan plants were eventually shut down wasn’t so much their treatment of horses as their treatment of human beings.

Most manufacturing boosts employment and dampens the crime rate, but not the processing of meat. Horse slaughter is particularly hard on a community: the animals have a chilling human-like scream and without the levels of government scrutiny a cattle-killing facility would have, corners are cut and costly environmental regulations flouted. Communities pay dearly for slaughterhouses, from environmental damage to sagging property values; but most horrid of all, slaughtering animals deadens a community. A strange corporeal apathy sweeps an afflicted area. Domestic violence spikes. At least one study found a direct correlation between arrests for rape and the presence of a slaughterhouse. In Kaufman, Texas—one of the last three plants in the United States before it was shut down in 2007—crime rates streaked upwards and kept going up until Harvard-educated local Paula Bacon became mayor and finally chased Chevideco’s satellite company Dallas Crown out of town. When they left murder and rape dropped back to zero and robbery went down 65 percent.

It took decades of litigation and help from powerful outsiders to uproot Dallas Crown; a feat that would be difficult to replicate were the industry to re-emerge in Oklahoma. Perhaps, most insulting of all, was that Kaufman received so little in return for hosting the plant. A peek at its finances revealed that Dallas Crown paid a mere $5 in federal taxes in 2004 from selling $12 million worth of meat (10 percent earmarked for zoo animals, 90 percent flown to Europe, presumably for blindfolded burger tastings).

* * *

There were worries that America would be flooded with abandoned horses when the last three plants were shut down. Numbers have crept up. The droughts of the past few years have quintupled the price of hay, putting the squeeze on owners. The New York Times cites the Unwanted Horse Coalition, which estimated that between 170,000 and 180,000 horses were “given up on by their owners” last year. Yet unwanted animals can be humanely disposed of without cutting them into steaks. (Subsidized euthanasia, for example.) Besides, if there are still people trying to swindle wild horses from the Bureau of Land Management during this historic glut of horseflesh, there has to be more of a demand for horses than there is a supply, which means horses will be raised for slaughter. And, with all due respect to our blindfolded friends across the Atlantic, there is something creepy about raising an animal for slaughter that we won’t eat ourselves. Chevideco and its ilk are after our horses. The thought of it ought to churn your stomach.

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Footnotes

1. Tume and Shaw, 1992

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Originally published in This Land, Vol. 4, Issue 8. April 15, 2013.

]]> http://thislandpress.com/05/02/2013/inside-the-abattoir/feed/ 0 http://thislandpress.com/04/29/2013/guide-the-best-cinco-de-mayo-parties-in-oklahoma/ http://thislandpress.com/04/29/2013/guide-the-best-cinco-de-mayo-parties-in-oklahoma/#comments Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:27:23 +0000 Natasha Ball http://thislandpress.com/?p=32045 Get ready, Oklahoma. A bumper crop of Cinco de Mayo festivals is about to fill your weekend with live music …

]]> Get ready, Oklahoma. A bumper crop of Cinco de Mayo festivals is about to fill your weekend with live music and plenty to spicy things to eat and drink. No matter in what part of the state you find yourself this 5th of May, there is a party in—or very near—your neck of the woods.

TULSA: Elote’s Cinco de Mayo Street Festival. A 400-pound pinata dropped from six stories: That was last year’s Cinco de Mayo party at Elote, a celebration only an army of luchadors could pull off. This year it’s a luchador band, soccer games, a drag-queen match and, of course, lots of luchador wrestling. More about Elote’s Cinco de Mayo Street Festival.

OKC: Cinco Cinco de Mayo. A Cinco de Mayo celebration at one of OKC’s favorite restaurants, featuring live music, drink specials, and, as you might have guessed, tacos galore. Find it all in the tent outside Iguana Mexican Grill on Ninth Street. More about Cinco Cinco de Mayo.

TULSA: El Guapo’s Annual Cinco de Mayo Celebration and Block Party. Downtown Tulsa’s preferred purveyor of myriad tequilas hosts this annual Cinco de Mayo Street Party in the Blue Dome District. Admission is free, 21+ only. Look for live music all day Saturday, leading up to a headline performance by Hosty Duo. May 4-5. More about Cinco de Mayo at El Guapo’s in Tulsa.

TULSA: 5 de Mayo Festival. Perfect for kids and adults alike who are looking for an entire weekend of Cinco-de-Mayo fun—and food. Hosted by the Tulsa Hispanic Chamber. More about the 5 de Mayo Festival.

OKC: Plaza Sunday. A day for relaxing and general community building, Plaza Sunday is the Plaza District’s brand-new midday event. For the launch, Oklahoma Contemporary brings the flavor of the Mexican holiday with a sugar-skull craft. Dig It! will also feature new works by Crypt-O-Licious, Dia-de-Los-Muertos inspired. A Cinco de Mayo celebration wouldn’t be right without a pinata, and Max from Bomb Shelter has provided a giant pinata filled with lots of goodies for everyone.

 More about Plaza Sunday.

TULSA: Fleet Feet Cinco de Mayo 5K. Add a little hop, skip, jump, and run to your Cinco de Mayo celebration. More about the Fleet Feet Cinco de Mayo 5K, plus how to register.

Don’t see your favorite Cinco de Mayo party on the list? Let us know (and leave some details, if you have ‘em), in the comments.

]]> http://thislandpress.com/04/29/2013/guide-the-best-cinco-de-mayo-parties-in-oklahoma/feed/ 0 http://thislandpress.com/04/29/2013/horses-and-dagger/ http://thislandpress.com/04/29/2013/horses-and-dagger/#comments Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:00:32 +0000 Jennie Lloyd http://thislandpress.com/?p=32404

Off rural Highway 16, along a dusty stretch of Bristow sits one of the largest live auction houses in Oklahoma. …

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Off rural Highway 16, along a dusty stretch of Bristow sits one of the largest live auction houses in Oklahoma. At the mouth of a wide gravel driveway, weathered plastic figures of a horse and steer greet passers-by with a stoic gaze. Black metal letters stand out against rust-colored rock: Mid America Stockyards.

For 40 years, Mid America has drawn packed houses to their Saturday cattle sale and horse auctions every other Monday. On busy auction days, three sets of stadium bleacher seats become a loud, moving sea of cowboy hats, well-worn plaid, and overalls. The earthy tang of horseshit and dirty boots steams up the stale, warm air. State flags flank both sides of the auctioneer who speaks and calls in an old-hand showboating twang.

Experienced riding horses, skittish unbroken colts and head-down workhorses—plus mules, donkeys, and even llamas—emerge from a whitewashed gate one at a time. They twitch their tails and ears under the lights, as the gathered crowd of grimacing men and gray-haired matrons bid on the animals.

Among these bidders are experienced “kill buyers.” These are the people who frequent auction houses to buy cheap horses by the pound, as cheap as a nickel a pound at MidAmerica,thensellthemtoslaughterhousesforaprofit.

Jerry and Helen Marie Varner have managed their highly profitable and well-respected family auction and cattle business for decades. The Varners see more than a thousand head of cattle come through their barns each week.

House Representative Skye McNiel, R-Bristow, still helps out with her grandparents’ business on Fridays. With her pretty blonde hair, blue eyes, and big smile, she serves hearty breakfasts and lunches at the stockyards’ café. Earlier this year, McNiel became a polarizing political figure when she introduced House Bill 1999, the bill that has opened Oklahoma to horse slaughter.

TOO QUICK, TOO QUIET

On February 20, 2013, HB 1999 passed in the House easily, 82-14, and officially ended a 50-year state ban on horse slaughter.

While McNiel’s bill sped through the House, a similar bill introduced by State Senator Mark Allen, R-Spiro, passed in the Oklahoma Senate with equal ease (SB 375 was approved 38-6).

McNiel garnered wide support for her bill among the deep-pocketed agricultural interests in the state, as well as the Oklahoma Farm Bureau and the American Quarter Horse Association. Calls and emails to Oklahoma Quarter Horse Association were not returned. According to national export data, quarter horses make up about 70 percent of all horses sent slaughter.

The bills passed quickly and with relatively little debate; a little too quickly and quietly for Representative Jeannie McDaniel, D-Tulsa.

“It just sort of snuck in quickly, and bang it was gone,” McDaniel said.

The aftermath of the bills’ initial passage caused an intense rift between opponents of horse slaughter and those who support the legislation. McDaniel said her email inbox is overflowing. The majority of McDaniel’s— all urban—constituents who have contacted her regarding HB 1999 are “overwhelmingly opposed,” she said.

McNiel said she’s received a lot of hateful and negative feedback, including a death threat currently under investigation by the OSBI.

“People will say things on a computer that they won’t say to your face,” McNiel said. “The Capitol police watch me when I’m in the Capitol Rotunda,” and anywhere on the grounds. She said she fears threats made against her family and daughters. But that doesn’t mean she’ll back down.

Governor Mary Fallin signed HB 1999 into law late Friday afternoon, March 29, 2013.

Fallin said HB 1999 would “allow the humane, regulated processing of horses.”

The law will go into effect November 1, 2013.

PUBLIC OPPOSED

Oddly, legislators’ support for horse slaughter far outweighs that of public opinion, according to a mid- March SoonerPoll commissioned by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). A strong 66 percent of Oklahoma voters opposed the passage of proposed legislation allowing for the slaughter of horses in the state. Most of those opposed—88 percent—are strongly opposed, the poll concluded. More interesting was that respondents in rural areas opposed horse slaughter legislation at high rates, not unlike their urban counterparts. In rural counties, 65.1 percent of those surveyed opposed the bills, with 69.6 percent of respondents in the Tulsa metropolitan area opposed and 64.3 percent opposed in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area.

The bills achieve a rare feat today—people of all political stripes hate on Oklahoma’s horse slaughter bills at high rates. Independent respondents were opposed or strongly opposed at the highest rate, 72.5 percent, Democrats at 67.6 percent and Republicans, 63.4 percent. Conservatives and moderates? They both oppose horse slaughter.

Horse-loving Americans gave a collective pearl- clutch when a YouTube video went viral in March. In the video, Valley Meat Company employee Tim Sappington is shown in cowboy hat and boots, cursing animal rights activists before shooting a black and brown colt between the eyes with a .48. The New Mexico man watches the horse drop to its side, then he walks toward the camera and says, “Good.”

The video outraged animal lovers coast to coast, garnering headlines and sparking fierce opposition to horse slaughter. Despite public opposition, Sappington’s employer, Valley Meat Company, may be permitted to slaughter horses within the next few weeks.

ThoughHB1999isnowstatelaw,abanonselling horsemeat for human consumption would remain in effect statewide. In Oklahoma, we can kill horses. We just can’t eat them.

HORSES SELL BY THE POUND

After the live auction is over, kill buyers—also known as contract buyers—turn a profit by selling the newly acquired horses to slaughter facilities across the border in Canada or Mexico. There, the meat is processed for sale overseas. Some horsemeat is sold back to U.S. zoos as lion and tiger feed, though its use in pet food was banned in the 1970s.

Nine million horses live in the U.S., and Oklahoma is home to about 326,000, according
to the Oklahoma Farm Bureau. Oklahoma City
is considered the horse show capital of the world, while Purcell, Oklahoma, boasts itself the Quarter Horse capital of the world. More than 12,000 Oklahomans work with, for, or around horses. Equines are our workmates and companions, not our entrees or appetizers.

However, some countries consider horseflesh a delicacy, priced on par with veal. The meat is much leaner than beef, contains no cholesterol and is rich in iron. In China, people eat horsemeat by the ton (about half a million tons a year). Italian gourmands crave tender, thin slices of prosciutto di cavallo. A Puglia, Italy, recipe for “horse chops,” or baciole alla barese, calls for rolled and seasoned pieces of horsemeat to pan sear in a coat of lard, red wine, and tomato sauce. In France, a hearty stew, or pot-au-feu de cheval, must simmer all afternoon to marry together the flavors of fresh garden vegetables and a horse’s collar meat. The flesh is also frequently smoked and made into cold cuts or squished into burger patties.

Currently, no horse slaughterhouses operate in the U.S., and the last three facilities shuttered in 2007. Since then, the number of horses imported by Canada and Mexico increased astronomically, 148 percent and 660 percent respectively, according to a June 2011 report released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). In 2010, nearly 138,000 horses were sent to Canada and Mexico for slaughter, about the same number that were sent to slaughter before the ban was put into place, the report found.

The GAO analysis of horse sale data estimated that closing U.S. horse slaughterhouses caused horse prices to drop on lower- and medium-end horses to the tune of 8–10 percent. Higher-priced horses held their market value, while the economic downturn repressed the prices of all horses by 4–5 percent, the report estimated.

Profits on horsemeat within the food industry are hard to analyze. Food margins are thin to start, and companies are always looking for a cheaper way to process meats. “Supply chains have become vast and unwieldy,” in a system where meat “now travels across multiple borders and through myriad companies,” according to an editorial in Financial Times.

IN THE KILL BOX

Pro-slaughter and horse advocates agree on one thing: the way other countries operate horse slaughterhouses can be, and often are, subpar, suspect, and—as a quick search on YouTube will reveal—revolting.

Cattle and livestock expert Temple Grandin, the autistic “cattle whisperer,” has asserted in a statement that she believes Mexican slaughterhouses, where thousands of horses are shipped from live auctions like Mid America each year, are inhumane.

“The worst outcome from an animal welfare perspective is a horse going to a local Mexican abattoir,” Grandin wrote in a statement on her website, grandin.com. “Once a horse crosses the Mexican border, there is no way to monitor how it’s transported or slaughtered. A plant in the U.S. would be monitored by the USDA/FSIS, and the conditions for both transport and slaughter would be better.”

Though Grandin does support ethical, well-run, and humane slaughterhouses in the U.S., she condemns south-of-the-border slaughterhouses because they use a small knife, known as a puntilla. These knives are used to sever the spinal cord, so horses are paralyzed and unable to breathe. The animals are then hoisted upside down, awake and able to feel pain, until they bleed out.

Canadian abattoirs have been repeatedly accused of ethical violations as well. Though they eschew the puntilla in favor of a quicker death, Canadian kill boxes can still lead to a terrifying death for easily panicked horses. More intelligent than cows and with twice the blood, horses simply aren’t the same as cattle. When a frightened horse is dragged from a pen into a kill box, he will often thrash his head against the sides of the wide stall in an attempt to escape. This thrashing motion makes it difficult to aim the captive-bolt gun at the horse’s head.

It is not a simple, easy, or quick singular blow to the head for many horses. Abattoir employees may shoot a frantic horse three or four times before he dies. Even then, undercover investigations by animal welfare organizations show signs of life in some horses as they are strung up, even after being shot multiple times.

Equines are our workmates and companions, not our entrees or appetizers.

In 2011, the Canadian Horse Defence Coalition (CHDC) released undercover footage and videos of a Quebec slaughterhouse. The footage showed everything from the misidentification and often missing information on the horses, to gross failures during assembly-line captive-bolt gun use. At the slaughterhouse they investigated, at least 40 percent of the horses in the stun box were not rendered immediately unconscious, according to CHDC findings.

In 2009, Humane Society International (HSI) reported 93,000 horses were slaughtered in Canada. The organization also expressed concern about the treatment of horses while they are transported from live auction to slaughterhouse. On these long trips, horses are loaded unceremoniously onto trailers, where Canadian regulations allow them to ride for up to 36 hours without food or water, according to HSI.

TOUGH TIMES, TOUGHER MEASURES

“In Oklahoma—as in other states—abuse is tragically common among horses that are reaching the end of their natural lives,” Fallin said after she signed HB 1999. “Many horses are abandoned or left to starve to death.”

Pro-slaughter advocates frequently say it’s the only option for strapped horse owners. Times are tough, and horses cost thousands per year in care and upkeep. U.S. slaughterhouses are sold as the perfect solution to the problem of abandoned, neglected, and aging horses. Unraveling this claim is difficult because there are no firm statistics or tracking in place to accurately count abandoned horses.

The governor referenced the 68-page GAO report to support her stance. “Comprehensive, national data are lacking,” the report stated, “But state, local government, and animal welfare organizations report a rise in investigations for horse neglect and more abandoned horses since 2007.”

The cases of horse neglect the GAO referenced were attained through interviews and anecdotal evidence. Pet- Abuse.com tracks cases of animal cruelty and abandonment in each state, though most are unconfirmed allegations. In Oklahoma, nine people reported the malnourishment, neglect or theft of at least 40 horses between 2011 and 2012. No reports have been filed in 2013.

For-profit slaughterhouses are a far cry from humane euthanasia, said Oklahoma City horse advocate Stephanie Graham. The cost of a quick, painless euthanasia, an injection given by a veterinarian, and disposal of the remains cost approximately $225, according to HSUS.

Graham grew up just outside Yukon, on a wheat farm where her family kept American Quarter Horses and Appaloosas.

“I grew up riding, showing, training, the whole works,” she said. “I always had my hand in the dirt or on a horse.”

Graham, a chronic pain specialist, has found herself immersed in battling recent Oklahoma legislation that would pave the way for horse slaughter facilities to open in the state.

“I wouldn’t call myself an advocate,” she said. “I’d call myself a decent human being. There’s nothing radical about that.”

People like Graham enumerate legitimate concerns, especially regarding the treatment of horses that are sent to slaughter across the border. It’s a concern shared by McNiel, who also condemns the “horrible” treatment horses often receive during transport to slaughter. She said a slaughterhouse in the U.S. would save horses the long distances they travel in cramped trailers.

On March 26, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals called out Oklahoma agricultural officials after an undercover investigator found serious violations during a ride with a kill buyer through Oklahoma. The kill buyer admitted he falsified health forms for the horses in his trailer, according to a PETA statement. The horses were transported from Iowa, though Kansas and Missouri, and then into Oklahoma before they headed to Texas. The kill buyer said a veterinarian taught him how to falsely “certify” the horses in his trailer were free of equine infectious anemia (EIA), a potentially fatal viral disease with no known cure or vaccine. The potentially infected horses were unloaded onto a crowded feedlot in Stroud, Oklahoma, PETA stated.

Agriculture Secretary Jim Reese said he and other officials are “aware” of the allegations, and that they are being investigated by the state’s multi-county grand jury, according to the Oklahoman. Reese told the newspaper that the jury is also looking into allegations of stolen property, concealing stolen property, and transporting stolen property across state lines, among other crimes.

CAN’T TALK FACTS TO EMOTION

The daughter of prominent Bristow cattle ranchers, Representative McNiel said she loved saddling up horses on Sunday afternoons. “We are predominantly cattle people,” she said, “But we love being on horseback.”

Her husband, Pecos McNiel, trains horses and is a talented auctioneer, and the couple’s two daughters have horses, too. “We understand how you can love a horse,” she said. “We get that. We love our cattle, show pigs, show lambs.”

But where horse advocates make a strong distinction between cow and horse, McNiel said, “It’s OK for cattle to be processed, and it’s an identical method for a horse.”

She said she finds it difficult to maintain common ground with opponents of HB 1999. “Our opponents are based on emotion,” McNiel said, “We can’t talk facts to them.”

To McNiel and other pro-slaughter advocates, capitalism is the answer. A demand for quality horsemeat in foreign markets plus an excess of unwanted healthy horses in the U.S. equals potential profits. And those profits grow once you subtract the expensive transport of the horses out of the country. It’s simple. Her opponents, she said, “want to make it very absurd and very gruesome.”

About 21,000 horses from Oklahoma are shipped to slaughter facilities across the border, with 160,000 ultimately sent to slaughter nationwide last year, McNiel said.

Even if legislation is passed and the ban on horse slaughter is lifted in Oklahoma, McNiel said she doesn’t know of any companies who are interested in opening a facility in the state.

She agreed we have a “problem” with transport and other ethical violations in foreign abattoirs, “and we need to address it,” she said. “We may need to look at population control, look at people who abandon or abuse horses. But we can’t do it through fear. We need to do it through facts.”

LIFTING MORAN’S AMENDMENT

Representative McNiel explained the language for HB 1999 has been simmering since 2006, she said, “when the U.S. federal government pulled funding for USDA inspections.”

McNiel is referencing the federal government’s effective prohibition on horse slaughter nationwide since 2006. A small piece of legislation attached to an annual agricultural spending bill effectively blocked funding for USDA inspections of horse slaughter. No inspection, no business, no deal.

The Moran Amendment would reinstate a 2006 ban on the slaughter and consumption. It is named after U.S. House Representative Jim Moran, a Virginia Democrat and co-chair of Congressional Animal Protection Caucus.

In 2011, the annual spending bill included language that would have continued the federal ban on funding for horse slaughterhouse inspections. However, before the bill reached President Barack Obama’s desk, it was stripped of the ban that was so easily approved in 2006. The president signed the bill into law on November 17, 2011. And just like that, a five-year ban on horsemeat inspections was lifted.

Valley Meat Company, the slaughterhouse that employs Sappington in New Mexico, could be ready to slaughter horses in a matter of weeks. Since then, a number of cities in other states have applied for horse slaughter inspection permits, including: Larkspur, Colorado; Gallatin, Missouri; Woodbury, Tennessee; and Sigourney, Iowa, according to Food Safety News.

As a response to Valley Meat Company’s application to slaughter horses in New Mexico, Representative Moran called on Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to deny permit applications for horse slaughter facilities. In the March 25 open letter to Vilsack, Moran wrote, “Horses are not raised as food animals and are routinely given substances that are banned by the FDA from administration to animals destined for human consumption.

“At a time when USDA’s budget is diminished by budget cuts and sequestration … every dollar spent at horse slaughter plants would divert necessary resources away from beef, chicken, and pork inspections—meat actually consumed by Americans.”

Moran urged Vilsack to “exercise all available options to prevent the resumption of this industry.”

Moran has also promised to fight for a federal ban on horse slaughter and for the reinstatement of his amendment. “I will be working with my colleagues in the coming weeks to include that language in the final Fiscal Year 2014 appropriations bill,” he promised in a March 8 statement. One meat processing plant, Oklahoma Meat Company, in Washington, Oklahoma, (just a few miles south of Norman in rural McClain County) has applied for an extension of USDA inspections. The facility already processes cows, sheep and goats, according to the company’s USDA application filed on May 24, 2012. The Oklahoma slaughterhouse differs from other applications in that it is owned by locals. Almost all horse slaughter facilities in the U.S. have been owned by Belgian, French, or Dutch interests.

Another measure is also circulating in federal houses of congress, called the Safeguard American Food Exports (SAFE) Act, which would shut down any possibility of an American slaughterhouse and slam closed the borders on kill buyers shipping horses to Canada or Mexico. The bipartisan legislation was written in response to the scandal in Europe, when horse meat was discovered in fast food meals after it was mislabeled as beef.

WHEN PICKENS MET BACON

Back in 2006, a more definitive ban on horse slaughter was also being promoted as a permanent solution.

One looming Oklahoma figure, T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire oilman and Oklahoma State University alumni, championed the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act, and became an outspoken opponent of horse slaughter at home and abroad. Despite disappointing his former colleagues in the cattle industry, Pickens told Time magazine in July 2006, “I don’t like it. And I’m going to do everything I can to stop it.”

One of the people he met during his quest to end horse slaughter in the U.S., was the outspoken former mayor of a small Texas town. Pickens was moved by Bacon’s story, and talked about her frequently.

Bacon ran for mayor after watching her beloved small Texas town fight for years to rid themselves of a horse slaughterhouse called Dallas Crown. Bacon spearheaded efforts to shut down the plant, which closed down in 2007. Though she is no longer mayor, Bacon still speaks out about the horror story of Dallas Crown.

“I’m fifth generation Kaufman,” she said proudly, in one of a few rapid-fire recent phone conversations. “I had an exuberant, empowering childhood.”

But, Bacon said, “The horse slaughter plant was a black eye” on her town. So she ran for mayor, in part to fight Dallas Crown. And she won on both counts.

When she got into office, she said, “We were about to have to build a new wastewater treatment plant”, plus update their sewer system to the tune of $2 million, “if we were lucky.”

Horses are frequently treated with antibiotics and worming medications toxic to humans, and because equines have twice the volume of blood as a cow (with less meat), wastewater and sewage problems were frequent and egregious. Hundreds of gallons of blood overwhelmed the small Texas town’s municipal capabilities. The blood and carcasses never seemed to stay put.

BLOOD BUBBLING UP IN BATHTUBS

Kaufman residents who lived near Dallas Crown frequently reported blood spills in the roadway and in ditches, as well as blood bubbling up in bathtubs and toilets. Residents’ photos reveal horse carcasses and bones on the plant’s property. Bacon said the stench of death was horrendous. The blood and the carcasses attracted hundreds of vultures, cockroaches, and other scavengers to the area.

Kaufman couldn’t shake its reputation as “the place where they kill horses.” Bacon said business investors would visit, but never call back. “The standard answer was, ‘It’s just not a good fit,’ ” she said.

Dallas Crown employed about 42 people, who were paid $7-$10 per hour for the undesirable dirty work that went on inside. The city gained nothing in sales tax revenue, while the plant’s property taxes were only $1600-$1700 per year; it wasn’t nearly enough to cover the city’s costs to support the plant municipally.

The local hospital installed special water filters because the water still wasn’t acceptable after treatment. Additionally, hospital administrators were “extremely unhappy because the prevailing winds carried a terrible odor there,” Bacon said. But the smell was inescapable almost everywhere in Kaufman.

A hundred percent of the people who lived in the vicinity of Dallas Crown signed a petition condemning the plant as a nuisance alongside the city’s city council, Bacon said.

When the plant shuttered, Chevideco left $916,000 in unpaid fines after 19 months of continual violations.

“Horse slaughter, it’s a burden on taxpayers,” Bacon said. “It’s not good jobs, and it’s going to hurt a community, not help.”

She believes that a horse slaughter plant in Oklahoma “absolutely” would have the same problems. Even after the plant closed, the city had to deal with watershed cleanup issues related to the horse blood, urine, and waste.

Once a foreign-owned plant sets up shop in a rural area, shutting them down again can be extremely difficult. “We were hamstrung by their deep pockets,” Bacon said. “I don’t think anybody realizes. God, it’s just almost impossible.

“We had so much evidence,” she continued. “But it was not sufficient help to get us out of this.”

An obscure state law banning horse slaughter in the state of Texas allowed Kaufman to finally rid itself of the plant. Dallas Crown is owned by an international conglomerate headquartered in Belgium. This allowed the slaughterhouse to dodge federal taxes, and made confrontation difficult.

She believes that a horse slaughter plant in Oklahoma “absolutely” would have the same problems. 

Chevideco appealed their case all the way to the Texas Supreme Court. “It’s only because the Supreme Court refused to hear their case that we got rid of them.”

McNiel said she believes Dallas Crown was an anomaly. “Can you tell me any industry where every single person acted perfect?” she asked. “One bad business out of all these hundreds shouldn’t give us a black eye for all eternity.”

After Governor Fallin signed McNiel’s bill, she stated, “Should there ever be a processing facility planned, my administration will work with the Department of Agriculture to ensure it is run appropriately, follows all state and local laws, and is not a burden or hazard to the community.”

The governor also noted that communities could block the construction and operation of horse slaughter plants “at the local level.”

BACK AT THE BARN

Back at the barn on auction day, bidders at Mid America Stockyards hold up small square cards, and conduct the comfortable call and response between auctioneer and buyer. According to HSI figures, more than 50 percent of horses sold at rural auctions like North America end up in a slaughterhouse.

After the deals are done and the bleachers have emptied, horses are loaded onto trailers in the lavender dusk of Oklahoma back roads; some head on to home pastures, others turn-signal onto highways that lead to places unknown.

---

Originally published in This Land, Vol. 4 Issue 8. April 15, 2013.

]]> http://thislandpress.com/04/29/2013/horses-and-dagger/feed/ 0 http://thislandpress.com/04/26/2013/episode-4-sugar-and-dirt/ http://thislandpress.com/04/26/2013/episode-4-sugar-and-dirt/#comments Fri, 26 Apr 2013 19:57:42 +0000 This Land http://thislandpress.com/?p=32438

This week, we dig.

Tom Naples combs the archives for Dust Bowl memories. Holly Wall unearths dinosaur bones in Black Mesa. Sheilah Bright gets swallowed by Kenton, Oklahoma. Natasha Ball gobbles up food truck culture. And, for dessert, a slice of blueberry pie.

More in This Land:
“The Last of Kenton” by Sheilah Bright
“Breakfast of Champions” by Natasha Ball
“Secrets of the Dust Bowl Digs” by Holly Wall

Related Links:
Eat Street Tulsa
H and 8th
ExplorOlogy: http://explorology.snomnh.ou.edu
Native Explorers: http://nativeexplorers.org

Music:
“Music for an underground circus”
“Dummy”
“Somebody Touched Me” by the Weeks Sisters
“Le Vieux train”
“Dinosaur Song” by Johnny Cash
“Eggs and Sausage” by Tom Waits
“Take off and Shoot a Zero”
“for reason, forgotten”
“There’s probably no time”
“Plantation”
“owco2_introspection”
“hydroscope”
“Intervention”

Subscribe to This Land Radio on iTunes here.

Oklahoma is home to an abundant community of odd and spectacular collections. Here, we highlight a few for you.

The Oklahoma Frontier Drugstore Museum and the Apothecary Garden, Guthrie

Across from the post office in downtown Guthrie, the well-preserved capital of Oklahoma Territory, is the Oklahoma Frontier Drugstore Museum and The Apothecary Garden. Entering the museum storefront is an instant time warp back at least a century. For a mere suggested donation of $4, one encounters dozens of dimly lit glass cabinets and counters stuffed with every type of medicine, remedy, cure, and corrective marking over half a century of American illness. For thousands of years the sources of medicine were herbs and plants, as seen in the large glass jars that sound today more like an exotic spice cabinet. Even the tools of the frontier pharmacist—mortar and pestle, vaporizer, pill-tile and spatula, percolator—seem like they belong in a kitchen. Is that a cookie jar? Ewww, it’s actually for leeches.

This treasure trove of pharmacy antiques is maintained by the Oklahoma Pharmacy Heritage Foundation, which is dedicated to “promoting interest in the history of pharmacy and drugstores and educating people about healing herbs and medicinal plants.” While it remains the size of an actual frontier drugstore, this micro museum calls to mind the cluttered cabinets of curiosities that emerged in the royal courts of Renaissance Europe, where rare objects of natural history were displayed alongside artworks, medical specimens, ethnographic objects, and miscellaneous thingamajigs.

Drawing by Emily Barton, 16.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Will Dudney, 17.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Elizabeth Mooney, 9.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Emma Sutterfield, 9.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Amaya Mason, 7.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Eva Mason, 4.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Eva Mason, 4.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Peter Chesser, 8.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Amaya Mason, 7.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Gunner Onkst, 9.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Mataya Woodard, 9.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Tommy Ball, 27.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Tommy Ball, 27.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Carson Rury, 9.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Maddie Watts, 15.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Chris Loy, 9.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Nicole Ratliff, 9.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Nicole Ratliff, 9.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Eva Mason, 4.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Benjamin Galley, 27.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Olivia Smith, 9.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Reagan Ballard, 8.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Ruby Lawson, 8.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Sam Ball, 5.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawin by Lacey Newman, 27.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Andrew Henderson, 9.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Jaxson Sykes, 8.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Rachel Porter.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Denver Henry.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Abby David.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by John Chesser, 5.

We asked artists of all ages to send us their best Oklahoma dinosaur drawings for consideration for the cover of our April 1, 2013 issue. Though we had to pick just one to put on the front page, we loved them all and wanted to share them with you here.

Drawing by Audrey Chesser, 6.

]]> http://thislandpress.com/04/25/2013/dinosaur-illustration-submissions/feed/ 0 http://thislandpress.com/04/24/2013/guide-woody-guthrie-center-opening-weekend-events/ http://thislandpress.com/04/24/2013/guide-woody-guthrie-center-opening-weekend-events/#comments Wed, 24 Apr 2013 20:30:09 +0000 Natasha Ball http://thislandpress.com/?p=32330 The time has finally come: A portion of the archives of legendary folk singer/songwriter Woody Guthrie—including the original, handwritten version …

For years, it housed hundreds of crates, buckets, and boxes, virtually forgotten except to be moved out of someone’s way—to an old naval barracks south of campus, for example, and then later to the fourth floor of a dormitory (a building absent an elevator, so the containers were hoisted by crane and swung in through an open window). Inside those boxes and buckets rested specimens from Oklahoma’s primordial past, some of them dating back 450 million years. For some time, government workers made sloppy attempts at piecing together the bits of bone but eventually, after time and money ran out, they gave up.

The crews digging for dinosaur fossils just outside Kenton, Oklahoma, were part of J. Willis Stovall’s WPA-funded “Fossil Bones Project,” responsible for unearthing some 30,000 fossil specimens between 1935 and 1942. They were inexperienced, barely trained, and pretty much guessing at what was rock and what was fossil as they chipped one from the other and attempted to reassemble the bones of God-knows-how-many dinosaurs into something that resembled the pictures they’d seen in books.

By 1942, they’d abandoned Stovall’s project, by order of the government, and left the bones where they lay—in boxes and crates, wrapped meat-market style in sheets of newspaper, tucked inside cigar boxes, broken and left jumbled in buckets.

They moved around a bit, taking up various residencies at the university, but other than that, they remained untouched for almost 50 years.

Today, the Fossil Bones Project stands as the most aggressive and fruitful dinosaur dig in Oklahoma’s history. It offered insight into the geology and natural history of the state, producing fossils of dinosaurs that haven’t been discovered anywhere else in the world. And it helped catapult what is now known as the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History from a twice-burned natural history cabinet, modeled off the curiosity cabinets folks once used to display oddities in their homes, into a state-sanctioned, world-class facility. But in order to understand the bones, you have to understand the dig.

The Primordial Panhandle

In 1931, road workers were clearing a path through Kenton and out of Oklahoma when they stumbled up a five-foot long rib bone, buried just beneath rock-dense earth. Oklahoma’s first vertebrate paleontologist, J. Willis Stovall, had recently begun work at the University of Oklahoma in Norman and was called out to investigate. The rib belonged to an Apatosaurus (known popularly—albeit incorrectly, as scientists have recently begun to point out—as Brontosaurus), and Stovall suspected that Black Mesa [1] might be rife with them.

This wasn’t the first fossil discovered in Oklahoma—that was the shoulder bone of a long-necked Cretaceous-period dinosaur found in southeastern Oklahoma in 1908 during a geological survey. That creature, named Acrocanthosaurus atokensis by Stovall, would later be named Oklahoma’s state dinosaur. Another dig, in the early 1930s, produced a collection of mammoth bones near Eldorado. But with no one around really interested in the excavation of fossils at the time, the findings were published and then all but forgotten (until the more recent past, when paleontologists revisited those sites; some of the later excavations are included in the Sam Noble collection).

Stovall wasn’t particularly interested in dinosaurs, either; he was teaching geology to OU students and finishing his Pvh.D. at the University of Chicago. Still undecided on the topic of his dissertation, Stovall got the call to claim a fossil and putt-putted his (probably) black Model T Ford the several hours to Black Mesa, where he excavated the rib and a couple more bones. He became frustrated with the excessive rock and rough digging conditions, gave up, and headed back south. The memory of the dig stuck with him, though.

In 1935, at Roosevelt’s order, the Works Progress Administration was created, and Stovall seized the opportunity to use federal funds to dig for dinosaurs in Oklahoma. His Fossil Bones Project was funded that year, and immediately crews were digging out fossil from rock in several quarries just a stone’s throw from New Mexico.The crews were local guys,hard-working men living hand to mouth, struggling to feed their families, with no education in science (or much else). They had no experience in the unearthing of million-year-old fossils and little training or supervision. C.R. Tate, the appointed foreman, led the crew because he had been to college and could “write more or less coherently.” [2] He suffered from polio and from personality conflicts with the members of his team and with Stovall, to whom he complained regularly about his working conditions and his doubt that his team could keep the Kenton project alive. Bones weren’t always easy to come by, and the crew’s livelihood depended desperately on their ability to produce.

They used basic tools—chisels, steel files, and jackknives—to dig the bones out of the hard earth. Heavy masses were blasted first with black powder and then moved by hand or horse. Crewmen had a difficult time telling bone from rock, and they sometimes scraped a fossil clear down to the spongiosa. When the weather was bad, they huddled in little adobe shacks, which also served as storage sheds, preparing their findings.

The Morrison Formation, where the men worked, was the most widespread formation in the Panhandle, formed during the Jurassic period. Back then, the ecology wasn’t the same as today; it was lush, verdant, with running rivers and tropical forests—the exact opposite climate that it has now. And it was through those forests and rivers that the likes of the Apatosaurus, Stegosaurus, Ceratosaurus (a horn-nosed meat-eater), and Camptosaurus (a broad-bodied, beaked herbivore) roamed. The crews were instructed by Stovall to gather every fragment of fossil they could find, and every so often Stovall or one of his students would drive to Kenton from Norman and haul away truckloads of bones.

The digs occurred during the Dust Bowl, when temperatures reached the far extremes during both summer and winter. When the quarries filled with snow, workers were forced to take time off, unpaid. When they were paid, it wasn’t much and checks were rarely on time. Local merchants made sure the men’s families didn’t suffer while they waited for their funds to arrive.

Over a period of seven years, the team excavated 12 quarries in Black Mesa; most of the documentation of their efforts has been lost, and what was available was mostly incomplete and often incorrect. (Later paleontologists would sort through them, reorganizing and recataloging the rubble.)

Bone by Bone 

Stovall was named director of the natural history museum, which housed exhibits in zoology, botany, and geology, as well as vertebrate paleontology, in 1943. While the exhibits occupied a space in the Geology Building, what wasn’t on display was stored in various buildings all over campus. Concerned primarily with teaching, managing the museum, and out-of-state fossil excavations in his free time, he didn’t bother much with the bones he’d collected years earlier. He also battled early-onset dementia. Stovall died in 1953, suffering a heart attack while on a dig in Wyoming, and passing the next day after being rushed back to Norman. The museum was renamed the Stovall Museum of Science and History in his honor. Other paleontologists followed after Stovall, but each had his own area of expertise, and none touched the treasure Stovall left behind— until 1986, when Rich Cifelli, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the museum and presidential professor of biology at the University of Oklahoma, was hired to, as he put it, “whip the collection into shape.”

Cifelli has narrow shoulders and hips, with chiseled biceps that creep out of the short-sleeved maroon dri-fit shirt he’s wearing the day I visited him and Museum Preparator Kyle Davies. They’re something of an odd couple, Rich trim and compact, clean-shaven with wispy brown hair. Kyle, taller and more rotund, wore wire-rimmed glasses and had a full, gray beard that hovered just above his blue “Kyleosaurus” T-shirt. Kyle’s the dinosaur guy, and he looks the part.

Cifelli studies mammals from the age of dinosaurs. When he arrived in Norman, the fossil collection was housed on the fourth floor of one of the dormitories. It hadn’t been touched since the ‘40s, left in its original field packaging. Large fossils were still wrapped in newspaper, and with every package he unwrapped, Cifelli relived the trial of Bruno Hauptmann in the Baby Lindbergh kidnapping and the Hindenburg disaster.

Some fossils were packed in straw; others perched on corkwood on rickety old shelves. Some of the smaller stuff was tucked inside old cigar boxes. He had 30,000 specimens to sort through.

“Some of the stuff was really badly messed up, badly broken, in bits and pieces,” Cifelli said. “It was like these people threw the bones on the floor and jumped on them, then mixed them up with a snow shovel or something. It was terrible.”

Through a series of grants from the National Science Foundation, Cifelli and a small team were able to dust them off, catalog them, and properly store them.

Davies first discovered dinosaurs as a child in the stacks of the library where his mother worked. He arrived at the University of Oklahoma in 1995 to help build the exhibits for what would become the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural Science. The museum opened in its current location in 1999, named for the oil baron benefactor who helped fund the 50,000-square-foot facility, which boasts the world’s largest Apatosaurus collection, the oldest painted object in North America—a bison skull discovered in 1994 that dates to 10,900-10,200 BCE—and a Pentaceratops skeleton, whose skull, at 3.1 meters high, is the largest of any land vertebrate.

Cifelli, Davies, and the rest of the Sam Noble team expanded Stovall’s original collection to about 75,000 specimen, about half of which are from Oklahoma. Additional fossils have been collected by Cifelli and other students and professors in Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Wyoming, and Montana. Some of it Stovall himself collected, out on escapades that were mostly for fun, at sites more productive than those in Black Mesa.The museum’s galleries boast some Okie dinosaurs, and others are regional, representative of what would have roamed Oklahoma millions of years ago. Stovall’s team cleared all the public land, but the state is still rich with potentially big fossil finds. What remains untouched is private, and, therefore, difficult to access. Until recently.

Modern Day Digs

Last June, a team of 23, for the first time since Stovall’s effort, broke earth at Black Mesa once again in search of Jurassic-period fossils. Like the WPA workers almost 70 years before them, these people were unskilled and minimally trained. But they weren’t men struggling to provide for their families; rather, they were students, accompanied by paleontologists, geologists, science teachers, and other scientists and volunteers, all of whom were hoping to instill in them some sort of appreciation of science.

They were underserved middle and high schools students and Native American college-students brought to Black Mesa by two programs— ExplorOlogy and Native Explorers, respectively—funded by the Whitten- Newman Foundation. The foundation purchased 700 acres of land containing new, untapped fossil quarries.

Students in the ExplorOlogy and Native Explorers programs uncovered more fossils, which are now being analyzed by the scientists at both University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University. At the end of the group’s trip, they began to uncover partially intact bones, which they capped, reburied, and will continue to excavate this June. The bones appear to have belonged to a large sauropod—perhaps another Apatosaurus, perhaps something completely new—and paleontologists are excited about unearthing the discovery. Unwittingly, students in the programs are themselves becoming a part of Oklahoma’s fossil history—a history initially written in bones and mud, and now a history celebrated and showcased before the world.

Footnotes
1. PArt of the Morrison Formation that extends through Colorado, New Mexico, and the western tip of Oklahoma.
2. “The Kenton Dinosaur Project,” Wann Langston. 1989.

Originally published in This Land, Vol. 4 Issue 7. April 1, 2013.

Holly Wall is This Land‘s news editor and aspiring paleontologist.

There’s Michelle lounging in her bathing suit; Michelle dressed up for a night out on the town; Michelle visiting tourist sites in Asia; and most abundant of all, boudoir shots of Michelle in various states of undress. There are studio portraits, casual snapshots, class photos, and glamour shots. For decades, apparently, Michelle duBois obsessively documented her life. And yet, she is almost entirely a mystery. In fact, she may never be knowable.

Here’s what we’ve been told: Michelle duBois grew up in Oklahoma and graduated from high school in 1967. After a failed attempt to become an airline stewardess, she landed in Guam in 1971. She spent the better part of the next two decades in Asia—Guam, Taiwan, and finally Japan—working as a prostitute to fund her travels. She married and divorced six times. Those brief yet redolent bits comprise the full extent of what has been revealed about duBois’ life. Thousands of photographs depict duBois from her teens to her late thirties. One of the many remarkable aspects of this collection is the lack of editing; duBois seems to have saved everything, whether or not they are well composed, properly developed, or present her in a flattering manner. She seems to have had a pathological need to be in front of the camera. The photos are unquestionably diaristic, despite the fact that, presumably, the majority of the images where shot by unknown photographers. Today, the entirety of duBois’ collection is in the hands of a 37-year-old artist based in Los Angeles named Zoe Crosher.

***

Crosher presumably received the entire cache of duBois’ photographs, dating from the 1960s to the 1980s, in the late 1990s. Since 2004, Crosher has repurposed these photos as raw material for a series of exhibitions and publications, collectively presented under the umbrella title of The Michelle DuBois Project. Among the manifestations the project has taken are a series of exhibitions held at various galleries, alternative art spaces, and museums in Los Angeles, Dallas, and New York, including a showing at the Museum of Modern Art. Another component is a four-volume set of print-on-demand books released by Aperture Foundation in New York City in 2011 and 2012. No two exhibitions or books are identical; each presents a new grouping or configuration of the photographs, so that some images appear more than once. To bring other voices and perspectives on the photos, the books contain various texts, each unpacking a diff erent aspect of the work. The volumes also carry their own individual titles: The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle duBois, The Unraveling of Michelle duBois,  The Unveiling of Michelle duBois, and The Disappearance of Michelle duBois. With her selections and regroupings, Crosher assumes a role akin to—but not exactly mirroring—an editor, curator, or archivist. Every time Crosher reshuffles the deck, using organizing principles with varying degrees of apparentness, she choreographs different reveals of her raw material.

Crosher’s handling of the archive is neither documentary nor investigative; she never intended to use the photos to give an accounting of her subject’s life. Quite the opposite; Crosher is deliberately tight-lipped about details she knows about duBois, including where in Oklahoma she was raised or currently resides. Crosher claims that duBois was a friend of her aunt’s, that duBois
gave the archive to Crosher personally, and that she is still alive. Crosher’s imprecision is not merely a device to keep an air of mystery surrounding her project, but is in accordance with her remarkably elusive subject. DuBois constantly reinvents herself, as evidenced by the remarkable shifts in her appearance in the photos. At times, her hair is brown, red, or blonde—she often wears wigs—and she is prone to wearing costumes. She adopts various aliases, and Crosher subtitles each book in her four-volume set with aliases/nicknames: “Kathy,” “Alice Johnson,” “Cricket,” and “Mitchi.” Given the highly slippery nature of the woman depicted, is it any surprise to discover that “Michelle duBois” is in fact also an invented moniker? Or that Crosher’s entire project has elicited a great deal of speculation about whether or not duBois is a total fabrication? Some have even suggested that Crosher herself posed for the photos, citing a physical resemblance between the artist and the subject. Crosher revels in the potential confusion. “Often, people think that I am Michelle duBois and that she is me,” Crosher stated in an interview with Artillery, a Los Angeles-based magazine. “I like that our identities appear to have merged; that people think we are one and the same. This is part of the work—how the details of a story are revealed or not revealed, how it all unfolds—and the blurring of boundaries of identity and understanding.”

All of this potential confusion and suspicion is in keeping with a woman who seems determined to make herself unknowable at the same time that she obsessively documents herself. These tendencies, seemingly at odds, tease the viewer in a seductive manner. DuBois offers herself up freely, but ultimately cannot be possessed.

***

Sexual seduction is the thrust, so to speak, of all the photos. The images range from flirty to trashy. DuBois has a penchant for dressing as archetypal seductresses such as sexpot nurse, belly dancer, hula girl, even 1930s screen star Mae West. She is often in the company of men (Crosher has described this male harem as “husbands, johns, boyfriends, and strangers”) and appears to be ever aware of the male photographer/viewer/consumer. DuBois’s commanding sexuality and willing self-objectification are in evidence throughout her life, from her teen years through middle age. While some of the individual photos unquestionably titillate, many of them fall flat in their attempted seduction. In fact, looked at collectively, the often awkward body of work sabotages the view of duBois as a master manipulator of her own image.

Taken over the course of decades, the photos document the passage of time. Th is is most evident in the parade of changing fashions sported by duBois: makeup ranging from black cat-eye liner in the ‘60s to frosted blue shadow in the ‘80s, as well as hairstyles stretching from beehive to Dorothy Hamill’s wedge cut. But it is also apparent in duBois’s aging, with its inevitable weight gain and sagging. There is a great deal of uneasiness looking at these images; each phase brings a new level of discomfort for the viewer who is confronted all at once with the awkwardness of youth, the fleeting nature of beauty, and the compromise of growing older. Perhaps the most uncomfortable aspectof bearing witness to duBois’s imperfections is that the subject herself displays no awareness of them. She strikes the very same poses as a middle-aged woman as she did when she was younger. Time and experience do not seem to have affected duBois’s behavior; the photos
don’t suggest any gaining of maturity, wisdom, or self-reflexivity. As Crosher has pointed out, these absences leave duBois extremely vulnerable.

DuBois’s anonymity arguably makes the works more interesting. Had the archive illustrated the life of a celebrity or public figure, its social or historical import would be inherent. But part of the intrigue here is in the lack of details about the person depicted. It is because we don’t—and can’t—know her that she is so fascinating. She is a blank screen for projection of our own imaginations. Among the most captivating images are the most banal: the geeky school girl, the cap-and-gown high school graduation picture. There is something at once disturbing and comforting in the familiarity of those images. They make us wonder about when and why did duBois resolve to live a life that was anything but ordinary. And the ways in which reality may have failed to live up to her fantasies. Crosher repeatedly refers to duBois as an “amateur,” and while that primarily refers to her lack of photographic training, that term is loaded with connotation. Both as photographer and in life, duBois seems to be a person who perhaps wasn’t guided or instructed so much as making it up as she went along.

***

Crosher’s The Michelle DuBois Project is an exercise in conceptual art, one that is equally about identity, photography, and memory, one that continuously loops back on itself in a cycle of self-references. It is difficult to get a firm grasp on an undertaking that is, as one writer described it, “Presenting someone else documenting herself performing herself.” Many critics compare Crosher’s work to that of Cindy Sherman, an artist who has become internationally celebrated for her chameleon-like transformation of herself for the camera. Sherman has been mining this approach for over thirty years, perhaps most famously in her Untitled Film Stills series of the late 1970s in which she posed as various feminine cinematic tropes, such as the ingénue and femme fatale. But there is a key diff erence between Sherman’s explorations and Crosher’s; Sherman (and many other female artists since) acts as both producer and model, working both sides of the camera at the same time. As some writers have noted, it is more accurate to compare duBois herself to Sherman, a fact that Crosher has acknowledged in one of the project’s components: an installation of twelve photos titled The Cindy-Shermanesque, But She’s the Real Thing (2005).

While the use of an archive as raw material for an art project may seem unorthodox, it has important precedents in contemporary art. In fact, visual artists have been engaging creatively with archives for decades. The photographic archive in particular has been fertile ground to elicit historical events, social and cultural mores, race and gender identity, and personal biography. Among
the many examples are Andy Warhol’s use of headshots of the NYPD’s “Most Wanted” fugitives and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s use of journalistic images of gunshot victims. Christian Boltanski uses found photographs to refer to lives destroyed during the Holocaust; Zoe Leonard creates an extensive photo archive investigating the life of a fictional 1930s lesbian actress named Fae Richards; Lorna Simpson re-stages vintage photographs of African Americans that she finds at flea markets and on Ebay. While some artists re-present found photos in a documentarian manner, others create new images and weave invented narratives around them, deliberately confusing fact and fiction.

One of the things revealed by Crosher’s work with the archive is the changing nature of photography. We now live in a digital era, in which photographs are invisible bits of data that exist in an electronic realm. Over the years duBois employed a wide range of formats—mostly extinct—including prints, slides, Polaroids, 4×5’s, and disc negatives. These photos are not solely images; they are tangible objects that can be held in the hand, put into albums, and show the wear and tear of their age. Crosher emphasizes their analogue nature by emphasizing their physical properties. She photographs the backs of prints, the envelopes the developed prints were delivered in, and the covers of some of the albums they were put into. She shows us duBois’s handwritten notes, sometimes scrawled on the backs of the snapshots, sometimes in the form of little scraps of paper clipped to the fronts. We also glimpse handwritten and numbered lists apparently made for Crosher’s benefit to help her navigate the plethora of images. These annotations mostly indicate places and dates, but a few include brief proclamations such as, “Only pair of overalls that ever looked good on me,” or the comically superfluous, “Me.” Modest messages that expose a peek into duBois’s own experience of looking at the archive along with us.

Crosher’s work with the inherited photos goes beyond simply presenting them. At times, she performs acts to “activating the archive;” moving from passive recipient to active collaborator,
playing a role in their transformation. For example, in some images, Crosher has used a marker to black out male figures who accompany duBois, leaving the prints resembling a top secret file that has been redacted by the government. Crosher eradicates the identity of these men based on the assumption that, to duBois, they were barely known and infinitely replaceable. In other works, Crosher has crumpled original prints, only to smooth them out and rephotograph them. Additionally, she has printed some of the images over and over again, progressively fading them until they are washed out, directly linking duBois’s literal and metaphorical overexposure. In yet other works, Crosher has added dust to the surface of the prints before rephotographing them. All of these manipulations are deliberate violations of the proper tenets of archival presentation and preservation of photographs, in which fading, dust collection, crumpling, and tearing are anathema. Such care-taking itself is somewhat anachronistic, as these traditional photographic “problems” have been eliminated by digitization.

In 2012, Crosher announced that her work with the duBois archive was complete, having reached its planned conclusion. And yet, the artist finds that her source material keeps suggesting new avenues of exploration. Crosher is planning to create a fifth volume to the book series, prospectively titled The Disbanding of Michelle duBois. Crosher believes this last installment, which she terms an “analogue epilogue,” will be the final step in what has been an epic exploration. This volume will depart from its predecessors in two distinct ways. First, the emphasis will shift from portraiture to landscape. Not every photo in the archive depicts duBois; a small percentage are dedicated to other subjects, including landscape. Among these are a handful of images of duBois’s native Oklahoma, and a larger number of landscapes shot in Asia. Second, Crosher intends to incorporate more of her own photography into the mix by travelling to sites in Oklahoma described to her by duBois and shooting them using old cameras and obsolete photographic techniques, ranging from slides to large-format negatives. The book will not distinguish between the photos shot by duBois and the ones shot by Crosher, thereby “conflating the real and the imaginary, taking away the question of specific authorship, collapsing us even more.” This shift from working solely with images that already exist to creating new ones is conceptually significant but not outside the parameters Crosher has set for herself with this project. All along, she has been questioning the very notions of authenticity. As she has stated, “Even though it is from the archive of a real person, this is about fantasy. Both her fantasies and the fantasy of photography itself.”

Originally published in This Land, Vol. 4 Issue 7. April 1, 2013.

More in This Land:
Article: Confessions of a Designated Hitter by Russell Cobb
Fiction: The Reverse Hijack by Brian Frazier
Article: Bass Ackwards by Beau Adams
Video: Tommy Biffle
Article: Go Fast, Turn Left by Clara Nipper

Music:
“Take the A Train” by Duke Ellington
“Fables of Faubus” by Charles Mingus
“Alabama” by John Coltrane
“I Want to be Evil” by Eartha Kitt
“Old Comrades” by United States Marine Band
“Don’t Stop Belevin’ [sic]” – The Ohio State University Marching Band and Dr. Jon R. Woods
“Power-Pole Down Song” by Rodney Clawson
“Sporting Life Blues” by J.J. Cale and Eric Clapton

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First printed on the back cover of the April 1, 2013, edition of This Land.

To help you audiophiles with your spring and summer planning, we rounded up some info on some of Oklahoma’s top music festivals, each of which offers an experience that is unique both to its locale as well as the full spectrum of music festivals going on this summer. Pack your lawn chairs and let us know which is your favorite.

Norman Music Fest

Set your watch to the passing of the train through the middle of Norman Music Festival, which straddles the tracks in downtown Norman’s arts district every April.

The festival, just six years old this year, has already drawn acts ranging from Portugal, Hayes Carll, and The Gourds to the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, Other Lives, and Leon Russell. This year, it’s The Joy Formidable and JD McPherson as headliners, with Mike Dillon, King Khan & BBQ Show, Big Sam’s Funky Nation, Defining Times, Grown Ups, Feathered Rabbit, Jonathan Tyler and the Northern Lights, Elephant Revival, The O’s, Samantha Crain, Beau Jennings & the Tigers, and Kyle Reid.

It’s easy to get a taste of Norman history and to check out what the rest of the city has to offer between the set times of your favorite bands—there’s OU, the restaurants and shopping of Campus Corner, and museums galore.

Find it in downtown Norman from Gray Street to Comanche Street, between Porter Avenue and Santa Fe Avenue. Festival hours are 6 p.m.-2 p.m. Thursday and Friday, noon-2 a.m. Saturday.

Tulsa International Mayfest

Tulsa International Mayfest is an annual outdoor tribute to the arts and music, created to promote a broader knowledge of and appreciation for arts and humanities among serious as well as casual art lovers. Many Oklahoma musicians got their start here, including pop megagroup Hanson and up-and-comer JD McPherson. More than 350,000 people are expected to attend this year’s event, celebrating the 41st year of the festival in downtown Tulsa.

Music headliners this year featured on the Williams Green Stage are:

Thursday, May 16: Monte Montgomery, an Austin-based award-winning guitarist (he’s one of the top 50 of all time, according to Guitar Magazine) and singer/songwriter, alongside John Fullbright, the 2013 Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter from Bearden, Oklahoma.

Friday, May 17: Royal Southern Brotherhood, featuring Devon Allman, Cyril Neville & Mile Zito in a blues, soul, and funk supergroup whose debut release was nominated as a Best Blues Rock Album by the Blues Music Foundation, with Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, a progressive alt-country group.

Saturday, May 18: Will Hoge, a Grammy-nominated Americana and Southern rock artist who has performed three times on the Grand Ole Opry stage, with Uncle Lucius, a group of young Texas rockers.

• More on Mayfest Tulsa music
• More on Mayfest Tulsa art
• More on Mayfest Tulsa food

Woody Guthrie Folk Festival

The legend who was Woody Guthrie turned 100 as part of last year’s festival, which, like a seasonal flood, fulls Guthrie’s birthplace of Okemah, Oklahoma, to the brim, with thousands of folk music fans from across the country overflowing from Pastures of Plenty and downtown Okemah.

It’s a dry festival, and it’s as hot as all get out, but here’s what we, as regular attendees of the festival, have figured out about it: if you’re crafty, the latest copy of This Land is large enough that it can do double duty as a fan for you and your friends. Plus, you can bring coolers. (Fill them with iced watermelon, is what we like to do.) If you’re staying overnight, ditch the room at the local hotel and pitch a tent at the campsite adjacent to Pastures of Plenty, where the sounds of strumming guitars and the singing voices of your fellow campers and festival-goers plays on until after first light.

The list of musicians this year would make Woody proud (and perhaps a little dizzy):

Trout Fishing in America. Ellis Paul. Jimmy LaFave. Vance Gilbert. Sam Baker. Annie Guthrie. The Burns Sisters. John Fullbright. Joel Rafael. Ramsay Midwood. Ronny Elliott. Tim Easton. Don Conoscenti. Audrey Auld. Garrett LeBeau. David Amram. Rebecca Loebe. Griffin House. Red Dirt Rangers. Steve Poltz. Milagro Saints. Otis Gibbs. K.C. Clifford. Grant Peeples. Samantha Crain. Radoslav Lorkovic. John Flynn. Parker Millsap. Nancy Apple. Lauren Lee. Monica Taylor. Oklahoma Geniuses. Hurray For The Riff Raff. Rebekah Pulley. Susan Herndon. Rob McNurlin. Butch Morgan. Happenstance. Greg Jacobs. Sam Doores + Riley Downing & the Tumbleweeds. Still on the Hill. Randy Crouch. The Damn Quails.

OK Mozart

We had yet to see an old Western open with a scene of Oklahoma’s rolling prairies, the credits backed by an interlude featuring the sounds of the French horn and the viola.

At least, not until 1984, we didn’t.

Then came OK Mozart, a music festival held each June in the old oil town of Bartlesville. It puts the spotlight on Grammy Award-winning musicians working in the classical genres, with features on local musicians trained in the more vernacular traditions. The festival packages the mix of performances as sets of subscription series that capture a diverse audience that comes from near and far to be part of the annual festival.

Last year the festival was a ten-day affair, featuring over 150 musicians—this year, the festival will feature music from some of America’s favorite composers, performers, and even movies, offering classical to bluegrass, cinema, western swing, and of course, a celebration of classical music, with the Amici New York Orchestra in its 29th year as the festival’s house orchestra. “The Wizard of Oz” will be presented on the big screen, with the Amici New York Orchestra playing the score live. For this event, children ages 12 and under can attend FREE. The outdoor concert at Woolaroc, a tradition including explosive performances onstage and fireworks overhead in the night sky, will feature some of the best of America’s songbook. The finale will welcome to the stage the Amici New York Orchestra along with Tony Award nominee, Broadway star and television actor Norm Lewis.

Some performance highlights and details:

June 8: OKM Kickoff Party is a FREE concert featuring local talent from the New Tulsa Sound. Look for Paul Benjamin, Wink Burcham, and Pilgrim, with Frank & Lola’s hosting.

June 9: “Wizard of Oz” will be shown on the big screen while the Amici New York Theater plays the score live. Children ages 12 and under can attend FREE.

June 10: An Evening of Bluegrass with Noam Pikelny (banjo, founder of band Punch Brothers), Bryan Sutton (guitar), Ronnie McCoury (mandolin), Barry Bales (bass), and Luke Bulla (fiddle), an historic collaboration between five celebrated acoustic instrumentalists and singers.

June 11: The Mirò Quartet, an internationally-acclaimed ensemble that has appeared at the world’s most prestigious concert halls. On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, Mirò will be joined by pianist Jon Kimura Parker who appears regularly with the world’s major orchestras.

June 12: The Amici New York Orchestra presents an evening of musical story telling that takes attendees around the world, with Chickasaw and Oklahoma native Jerod Tate’s tale of the “Spider Brings Fire”, along with Erica Kiesewetter’s rendering of John Corigliano’s music from the 1998 film “The Red Violin” and Dvorak’s American inspired “New World Symphony.”

June 13: Austin-based Hot Club of Cowtown have grown to be the one of the most globe-trotting, hardest-swinging Western swing trio on the planet. They have opened stadiums for such artists as Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson.

June 14: The Amici New York Orchestra puts “Hollywood on Parade” at this year’s Woolaroc Outdoor Concert, featuring the music from quintessential American movies. The Orchestra will perform some of the most iconic film music by John Williams, Elmer Bernstein, Henry Mancini, and others, along with patriotic music by John Phillip Sousa, Morton Gould, Aaron Copland, and a Salute to the Armed Forces that will lead to spectacular fireworks under the stars.

June 15: Amici New York Orchestra brings “America’s Musical Bounty” to the festival finale, featuring Tony Award nominee, Broadway star and television actor Norm Lewis, who most recently performed the title role of Porgy in The Gershwin’s PORGY AND BESS and just returned from a very successful year’s run in London playing the role of Javert in LES MISERABLES. He and the Amici New York Orchestra will also be joined by the Bartlesville Choral Society.

Look for showcase concerts and events with local performers, plus puppet shows and kids’ concerts, and a variety of unique performances throughout the day and evening during the week-long festival.

Rocklahoma

Camping. A beauty pageant. Four days of rock, rain or shine. Which is really saying something when you’re talking about an outdoor party in the middle of storm season in the heart of tornado alley.

The festival that does wonders for the population size of Pryor, Oklahoma—and does a real number on one of its largest pastures and campgrounds—serves up headliners from the highest echelons of rock, counting Rob Zombie, Chickenfoot, Creed, Megadeath, and Slash among its past performers. It’s life, liberty, and the pursuit of rock, all just up the road from Tulsa. It’s Rocklahoma.

This year’s headliners:

Friday, May 24: Guns N’ Roses, Bush, Papa Roach, Device, Ratt, All That Remains, Clutch, Escape the Fate, The Sword, Otherwise, Fist of Rage, London’s Dungeon, Ruff Justice, Bai Bang, Hessler, The Last Vegas, Down & Dirty

Saturday, May 25: Alice in Chains, Bullet for My Valentine, Skillet, Halestorm, Asking Alexandria, Big Wreck, Young Guns, We As Humans, Mindset Evolution, O’Brother, Emerald City, Sister’s Doll, Big Trouble, Black Tora, London, Wildstreet, Gypsy Pistoleros, Sunset Riot, Rhyme

Sunday, May 26: Korn, Cheap Trick, Hollywood Undead, Steel Panther, Dokken, Motionless in White, Thousand Foot Krutch, Red Line Chemistry, Heaven’s Basement, American Fangs, Scorpion Child, Wicked, Ragdoll, Station, Firstryke, Switchblade Scarlet, Lynam, Mystery, Nasty Habit, The Glitter Boys.

More Oklahoma music festivals

• April 19-20: Smokin’ Red Dirt BBQ & Music Fest, Enid
• April 20-21: Music on the Mountain Viking & Celtic Festival, Heavener
• April 23-28: Festival of the Arts, OKC
• April 25-27: Calf Fry 2013, Stillwater
• May 1-4: Tri-State Music Festival (marching bands!), Enid
• May 3-4: Bixby BBQ ‘n’ Blue Festival, Bixby
• May 24-27: Backwoods Bash Music & Camping Festival, Prue
• May 25-26: Edmond Jazz & Blues Festival, Edmond
• May 30-June 1: Tallgrass Music Festival, Skiatook
• June 6-8: American Heritage Music Festival, Grove
• June 20-22: Jazz in June, Edmond
• Aug. 30-Sept. 1: Jana Jae Fiddle Camp & Music Festival, Grove
• Sept. 5-7: Bluegrass & Chili Festival, Claremore
• Sept. 15-21: Arbuckle Mountain Bluegrass Festival, Davis
• Sept. 28-29: Medicine Park Flute Festival, Medicine Park
• Sept. 28: Plaza Festival, OKC
• Oct. 3-5: Oklahoma International Bluegrass Festival, Guthrie
• Hound Dog Blues Festival, Tulsa

Editor’s note: Free Tulsa should of course be counted as one of the top music festivals in Oklahoma. Once a date is set for the 2013 festival, we plan to update this list.

Make Oklahoma better. Subscribe to This Land and support local journalism in your community.

The driveway opened into a circle where a stainless steel tree sculpture by Roxy Paine titled Yield(2011) stood alone in the grassy center. It’s the first work of art visible on the museum’s grounds and it focuses on how the natural and artificial intersect—a fitting sculpture for a museum that explores similar subject matter.

The short stroll from the parking lot does not allow for a view of the museum’s unique architecture. I walked behind a Hispanic cowboy to the elevator, listening to the heels of his boots hit the concrete. I stood beside him as the elevator doors opened, scattering a blond family in burgundy Razorback shirts. Th e doors closed and we descended to the museum’s main entrance.

Two greeters positioned by the entrance doors welcomed visitors into the first gallery, advised us of the rules (no flash photography or pens), and of their availability to answer any questions. The lighting was ambient and echoed the relaxed and friendly demeanor of the greeters. Floating around, I overheard the greeters exchanging doubts about passing the museum’s docent training program. The Tyson family of Tyson Foods recently donated $5 million for an American art research and residency program, an area of scholarship less developed than many other fields of art history research.

“George Washington must have had rosy cheeks,” observed one visitor in the colonial gallery after a few moments in front of Charles Winston Peale’s well-known portrait of our first president. “He’s always portrayed that way.”

The visitor rolled her mother’s wheelchair beside me as I stood in front of an oil study for a portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette by Samuel F. B. Morse. The Marquis de Lafayette was just 19 when he came to America from France and soon became like a son to Washington, fighting alongside him throughout the Revolutionary War. The city of New York commissioned Morse to paint the Marquis’ picture when he returned to America. While Morse was painting the Marquis’ portrait, he received a letter from his father informing him that his wife had died suddenly from a heart attack. He rushed home, leaving his final portrait of the Marquis unfinished, as the museum’s unfinished oil study suggests. When Morse arrived home, he found his wife had already been buried. Heartbroken, Morse put aside painting to focus instead on creating a more rapid form of communication that would have allowed him a proper goodbye to his wife. Thirteen years later, he patented the Morse code, followed by the telegraph.

I sat down on a bench in the center of the room, watching visitors move around the curved gallery like carousel horses. A small girl jumped in front of the portrait Mrs. Theodore Atkinson, Jr. by John Singleton Copley(1765) to view her pet flying squirrel in the foreground. Her mother leaned in closely to examine Mrs. Atkinson’s precisely painted pearls.

As I continued into the 19th century gallery, John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife(1885) drew me in with its revealing view into the life of the Scottish author best known for writing Treasure Island. Stevenson was known to fidget around the room as he wrote and Sargent captured him in mid stride, perhaps mulling over his soon to be published novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Stevenson wrote the novel quickly after waking from a dream. It is rumored that he burned the first manuscript after seeing how upset the story made his wife, rewriting it in less than six days, high on cocaine. Sargent’s painting was sold to Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn in 2004 who intended to display it in his newest casino, Wynn Las Vegas. Fortunately for visitors to Crystal Bridges, Wynn’s gallery venture failed.

Between the galleries are small, naturally lit rooms where visitors can sink into a leather sofa and flip through one of the hundreds of books casually arranged on nearby tables. Glass-enclosed corridors provide floor to ceiling views of what some might consider the most beautiful part of the museum: its landscape.

Moshe Safdie, an architect known for his special attention to a building’s relationship with its natural environment, designed the museum inside an existing hollow of the Ozark Mountains. Safdie was born in Haifa in 1938 and moved to Montreal, Canada, in 1953.

“I’m going to do something very unique,” Safdie revealed to Director of Facilities and Grounds Scott Eccleston, in his Israeli accent, “I’m going to let the landscape completely absorb the building.”

Crystal Bridges’ architecture can easily steal the show. Floor-to-ceiling windows frame striking views of the stream, which not only surrounds the museum but also flows underneath its buildings. The museum’s surrounding hills and valleys are mimicked in its architecture. Arched pine ceilings allow cathedral-like light into parts of the museum—most notably its restaurant, Eleven. Beyond the glass, there was another collection of original American art on display I had yet to discover.

Scott Eccleston’s encyclopedic knowledge of American plants does not go unnoticed at the museum. He views the land surrounding Crystal Bridges as its living collection. Every tree over six inches in caliper is recorded and entered into the museum’s database.

“These native American plants embody the American spirit and tell the history of the land,” he explained. The plants even have their own Facebook page.

Six unique trails present manicured paths through which visitors can experience the museum’s grounds. One of the featured sculptors on the museum’s grounds is New Orleans-based conceptual artist Robert Tannen, who considered how to approach the museum’s surrounding forest from an artist’s standpoint.

“My interest was to make the forest a part of the museum,” Tannen told me.

For his sculpture Grains of Sand (2011), Tannen placed 15 boulders of Arkansas native limestone—ranging from one to twenty tons in weight—at 15 sites on the ground of the museum that highlighted a beauty mark of the land or a striking view of the museum.

***

When I worked at Christie’s in New York, I delighted in walking through the auction preview exhibitions. A week before being scheduled for the auction block, roughly 50 paintings, prints, photographs, and sculptures would rest in one of Christie’s galleries, each vying for the attention of its future owner. When the doors opened, the gallery came to life, filled with hums of approval and lip-to-ear whispers. Potential bidders would glide around the room nodding at familiar names while jotting down notes in their catalogues.

After each auction, I would read over the freshly printed auction results that listed each work’s buyer as either private or public—the latter meant these artworks would likely be going to a museum. All too often, paintings moved into private hands. In a week’s time, they would be shipped and hung on walls in homes to which I would probably never be invited. For one private collector in the heartland of America, those works inspired her to create a public space for her growing picture book of United States history.

Alice Walton, the only daughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, has acquired a collection of American art that is the foundation for the $800 million Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art founded in her hometown of Bentonville, Arkansas, a city of 36,000. In only a decade, she has built the first museum of American art in the 21st century and filled its 200,000-square-foot exhibition space with a comprehensive collection.

Wal-Mart, Tyson, J.B. Hunt, Johnson & Johnson, and PepsiCo are just a few of the large American corporations that are located in or around Bentonville, some of which have donated millions to the museum. With such deep-pocketed contributions from its corporate neighbors and support from its residents, Crystal Bridges has the essential ingredients for success. And with this, cause for jealousy.

New Yorkers howled with anger when Walton offered a record $35 million for Asher B. Durand’s Kindred Spirits (1849). This quintessential Hudson River School painting illustrates man’s connection with nature, which is the elegant undercurrent of the museum’s collection. Her purchase of this masterpiece of American landscape painting demonstrated to the art world she was amassing a serious collection of American art. Today, Kindred Spirits is the centerpiece of Crystal Bridges’ collection.

Back inside, a tattooed teenager sat quietly on a bench in the 19th century gallery, listening to her iPod and sketching in front of a Mary Cassatt painting. Shuna Wilson, museum security guard, interrupted my inspection of the Cassatt to draw attention to the diligently drawing adolescent seated on the bench.

“Did y’all see her stuff?” Wilson grew taller with excitement, pointing to the oblivious artist. She stood behind her, hands on her hips. “Girl,” she admired, “that is awesome!”

“This place is alive,” Wilson continued, reaching out to rebutton my sweater where I had missed a button. “There are all kinds of people that visit this museum,” she reflected. “Talented people come here to be inspired. Being surrounded by great art drives their talent even more,” she pointed to the seated artist. When asked to name her favorite work in the museum she replied without hesitation: “Rosie. That’s my girl!” [1]

Since the museum’s opening last year, several curators have left their positions. Most recently, Don Bacigalupi, the museum’s esteemed executive director has been reassigned to a new position as president. Is such rapid employee movement in the museum’s first year typical of a new institution trying to find its feet? Or do these departures reveal challenges working with Walton, or in Bentonville?

In the contemporary gallery hangs a painting from Jackson Pollock’s psychoanalytical period, Reclining Woman (c.1938 – 41), when he underwent Jungian psychoanalysis to deal with his alcoholism, which wasn’t working too well. Pollock’s earlier realistic painting would later evolve into his well-known drip paintings, an expression of his manic ego for which he is best known. But what inspired his change of style? Visitors need only to walk across the gallery to view the large abstract painting Heavenly Sympathy (c.1947) by Janet Sobel.

In 1945, the virtually unknown Sobel was given a museum exhibition by famed gallery owner Peggy Guggenheim, who was entranced by her drip-like paintings. Pollock would view her work one year later, noting that Sobel’s paintings were the first examples he had ever seen of their kind. He began experimenting with dripping paint onto his canvas-covered floor which again grabbed the attention of Guggenheim. With her help, Pollock would become the poster boy for Abstract Expressionism—forging American artists into the previously European-dominated spotlight. Without the patronage of Peggy Guggenheim, some question whether American Abstract Expressionism would have risen as prominently as it did.

And so the story of American art continues with Alice Walton and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, whose architecture, artworks, and free access to exceptional art have been set in motion in the middle of America. While Walton may lack the gregarious personality and Parisian connections that attracted artists to Guggenheim, her purchasing power and desire to forge relationships with other institutions such as the renowned musée du Louvre are very much the signs of a savvy 21st century collector. Each artwork in the museum—including how and why it was secured and where it is displayed—is a part of our country’s visual history.

“We believe that everyone who walks in the door, no matter who they are, has some frame of knowledge already and can experience the artwork in a meaningful way,” said Crystal Bridges’ Education Director Niki Stewart. “They have their starting place. Wherever you are is enough.”

Footnotes

1. Rosie the Riveter by Norman Rockwell

Ariana Jakub is an art consultant, educator, and gallerist living in Tulsa.

Originally published in This Land, Vol. 4, Issue 1. April 1, 2013.

“Don’t leave until you see this,” he said, ushering me toward an unlit room. “Just take a few steps inside and wait a minute.”

The guard closed the door behind me, leaving me in darkness. The sounds of Manhattan’s traffic faded, and I stood still and waited. Faintly, flickers from miniature Japanese lanterns began floating around me like fireflies. The walls of the room were lined with mirrors, so as the lanterns brightened, they fanned out into a glowing galaxy surrounding me. A few moments before, I had been tromping through the busy streets of New York City; now I found myself suspended in a quiet starfield, transfixed by the sight. Before long, the lanterns began to dim, then faded entirely. The door opened, and I walked back out of the darkness and into the world of taxi horns and skyscrapers.

Yayoi Kusama’s installation Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity started me on a search for sublime spaces, a quest for modern day temples. In America’s middle, temples aren’t abundant—at least not the proper ones. There are temples to bass fishing and temples to football and temples to entertainment, but few are the temples that satisfy their original purpose: to induce a sense of stillness and to focus our awareness. Inevitably, the search for the modern temple led me to the American artist James Turrell.

Since the 1970s, Turrell has been building structures called Skyspaces, where the sky itself is presented as the subject. The structures invite contemplation and evoke wonder.

“Overall, I see each of the eighty or so Skyspaces I have made as unique, separate chapters in this novel of having continuous twilight throughout the world,” Turrell told me in an email. He said that Skyspaces stand in 25 countries and in 21 states in the U.S. Turrell is a Quaker, a member of America’s most Zen religion; he designed a meeting house for the Society of Friends in Houston with a convertible roof that allows skylight into the structure. Much of Turrell’s art involves presenting light in a way that gives it the appearance of achieving mass and weight—a popular piece at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, for example, tricks viewers into seeing a canvas where there’s actually a hole in a wall. Yet Turrell isn’t so much an illusionist as he is a provocateur of light. He sculpts in the plane between human perception and physical space, exploiting the idiosyncrasies of both to arrive at surprising illuminations.

“I think that even when you go into gothic cathedrals, where the light and the space have such a way of engendering awe … what the artists have made for you in this place is almost a better connection to things beyond us than anything the preacher can say,” Turrell told an interviewer in 1999.

For years, Turrell has been working on one of the most anticipated art installations in the world, the Roden Crater art project near Flagstaff, Arizona. Pictures of the unfinished project have been posted online and look like scenes from a futuristic moon landing. Few visitors have toured the crater, and hardly any details of the work appear online—though a recent comment on the project’s Facebook page suggests that the crater’s opening is still a few years away.

In 2009, Turrell began work on The Way of Color, a Skyspace that showcases a nine-and-a-half foot oculus of Ozark sky from the grounds of Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas. Built from regional stone, The Way of Color is a bunker-like building lodged into the side of a hill. You enter through a square hallway and into a round room that has a horseshoe-shaped bench running along its sides. On the tiled floor, there’s a large circle of black sand that mirrors the opening in the ceiling above it. The building itself lacks ornamentation because its design is meant to draw attention heavenward, toward the sky itself.

During the day, the open disc of sky sets a serene and contemplative tone in theSkyspace. At dawn and dusk, however, a new display emerges.

I visited The Way of Color under a cold and blank January sky. The muted light inside the building felt gentle and grayish blue—you could sense the sky bending toward night. At 5:28 p.m., a glow appeared from the discretely placed fixtures that circumnavigated the room. The space swelled with a soft yellow. As the lights along the periphery slowly changed colors, the blue tones of the sky yielded to greens and pinks and dozens of other wavelengths along the spectrum. Over the course of thirty minutes, I sat quietly among a dozen other visitors and watched the Skyspace slowly shift shades.

Turrell designed The Way of Color to correspond to the specific characteristics of Arkansas’s sky.

“Even though it is in the Ozarks, it is part of the Middle American big sky, and the humidity strikes a blend between very humid and very dry,” Turrell explained. “As far as the light pollution, Bentonville as a neighborhood is low on that scale so that we do get a very good vision in nautical twilight.”

During the light display, a curator for the exhibit encouraged us to look out into the hallway if we wanted to remind ourselves of the sky’s color outside. I craned my neck around the corner and saw the dying light through the branches of the surrounding forest and wondered if that sky’s color was any truer than the one above. The Way of Color shows us that our surroundings shape what we see, that our own eyes and minds perceive a reality that isn’t as immutable as we might think.

The final few minutes of The Way of Color are the most dramatic. A deep sapphire light saturates the room, and the sky above grows dark purple. As the LEDs sweep across a brighter, richer array of colors, there are occasional pulses of dark, where the midnight blue light inside matches the outer night sky. It feels like the opposite of a camera flash, as though your mind is blinking instead of your eyes. At the end of the light sequence, a clean black disk of night hovers atop the room, reflecting the black circle of sand below. One by one, visitors stand up and walk out into the night, this time more familiar with the sky, and—if Turrell has reached them—a part of it.

Originally published in This Land, Vol. 4, Issue 7. April 1, 2013.

More from This Land Press:

Article: “A Symphony of Bees” – Mark Brown
Video: This Land Presents: A Symphony of Bees
Article: “Begetting Bats”- Natasha Ball

Featured Music:

“This Land Theme Song” – Costa Stasinopoulos
“This Land is Your Land” – Woody Guthrie
“The Tale of Tsar Saltan: Flight of the Bumble-Bee” – St. Petersburg Orchestra of the State Hermitage Museum & Alexander Titov
“Eros Vibraphone” – The Books (from freemusicarchive.org)
“Leatherwing Bat” – Pete Seeger
“I’m an Animal” – Neko Case
Bat call – digifishmusic.com (from freesound.org)

Subscribe to This Land Radio on iTunes here.

Are you afraid to place an absolute, theoretical limit on the combined accuracy of certain pairs of simultaneous, related measurements? Boys, I know you feel uncertain… but it’s a law, dammit. You can’t know where the ball is AND how fast it’s going. But listen to this: the Pistols don’t know that the mathematical product of the combined uncertainties of simultaneous measurements of position and momentum in a given direction cannot be less than Planck’s constant h divided by 4. And you do. You do because we drilled and drilled and drilled. You are gonna sweat if I have to speak of causality in a framework described in terms of space and time! And that’s how we’re gonna fool them. Use it! Use the knowledge. You alone can prevent them from making absolute predictions about the future states of any given system, and I said any! You are not eleven boys anymore, but positively charged ions! An animal in the subatomic world! Get out and mow those sissies down! Put them to the ground! It’s a law and an order!

Me Head was a free-press zine that was launched in 2000 and distributed in Tulsa, Dallas, Austin, and Phoenix. It featured early works from several writers who have since contributed to This Land. During peak periods of its brief circulation, it boasted 300,000 online readers a month. Only three of the six issues were circulated in print. In 2013, This Land Press will publish the collected works of Me Head.

The airwaves danced and shivered and sizzled with all sorts of regular programming: music and variety shows, certainly, but also tales of high adventure, bone-chilling horror, two-fisted action, and comedies of all stripes. Ending at about the time Top 40 radio and the rising tide of baby boomers flooded the format in the mid-’50s, the golden age of radio lies well in our past. But if you know where to look for it, you can still find it echoing across the airwaves.

And if you want to celebrate, or simply learn more about, one of its biggest attractions, the rustic comedy team of Lum and Abner, you barely have to cross the state line.

***

Ask one of the two proprietors of the Lum and Abner Jot ’Em Down Store and Museum in Pine Ridge, Arkansas, to direct you to the restroom, and he opens the front door and points down the road.

“You wouldn’t want it too close to the store, would you?” Lon Stucker asks, rhetorically. Since retiring from the Navy in 1979 (his last job was loading Poseidon missiles onto submarines), Lon has owned and operated the two buildings—not counting the detached privy—with his wife, Kathy, who now adds her own bit of outdoor-toilet wisdom.

“You know what they say about outhouses,” she laughs. “They’re always too close in the summer and too far away in the winter.”

Turns out that the one outside the Lum and Abner Museum is, itself, a kind of museum piece.

“It’s called an ‘Eleanor,’ ” explains Kathy. “Around the end of the Depression, Eleanor Roosevelt sponsored lots of rehabilitation projects for the country. Outhouses were quite unsanitary, smelly, all kinds of things. Well, if you’d burn your old outhouse, the government, the Roosevelt administration, would provide the equipment and supplies for you to make, according to their plans, a new outhouse. It’s got a concrete base, and a concrete stand, and then behind the seat is this wooden tower with a vent that goes out both sides. So the septic gases, instead of just coming up through the seat and filling the building, go through that tower and out through the side vents.

“The one we have was built in 1940 about a mile down the road, at one of the homestead places. It was in their front yard.” She laughs again. “About twenty years ago, they decided they wanted it out of their front yard.”

It was only natural that those folks would contact the Stuckers. Under their watch, the Lum and Abner Museum has not only become an internationally known memorial to one of old-time radio’s bestloved comedy teams, but also a reminder of the way life used to be for the hill folks of Arkansas’s Ouachita Mountains, only a couple dozen miles east of the Oklahoma border. In addition to an impressive selection of memorabilia from the radio show and its movie spin-offs, as well as life-sized effigies of the boys themselves, the Lum and Abner Museum holds ancient tools, patent medicine bottles, class rolls from long-vanished public schools, a bed brought back from Pearl Harbor by an area resident after the infamous bombing, and checks cashed many decades ago, some written in pencil, others with the name of the bank lined out and another scratched in. Also, antiquated appliances, including an ancient woodburning stove.

“That’s from a neighbor,” says Lon. “A lady up the road called us and said, ‘I’m getting ready to get a new stove and some new furniture and stuff . Do you want that old stove of mine?’ I said, ‘Yeah. What do you want for it?’

“She said, ‘I guess I’d have to have a hundred dollars.’

“So I went up there to get it, and she said, ‘Well, you can’t have it yet. I’ve got a pot of beans on it, and they’re still cooking.’ ” He laughs. “When she got done, she called me and said, ‘OK,’ and I went up and got it. It was still hot.”

That list of items may sound like an antique-shop potpourri, but, taken in context, it’s anything but random. The Stuckers, who are both old enough to have listened to Lum and Abner on the radio during the latter part of its original run (1931-1955), know that the program and its particular attitude and angle of vision grew out of the heart and soul of rural Arkansas, surrounded by these sorts of artifacts. What the Stuckers have preserved is not only a history of Lum and Abner, but a chronicle of their people, without whom there would’ve been no radio show at all.

•••

Chester Lauck, known as “Chet,” and Norris “Tuff y” Goff both grew up in Mena, Arkansas, about 20 miles east of Pine Ridge. Becoming pals in grade school, the two earned a reputation as class cut-ups before graduating and heading off to college. Both began at the University of Arkansas, but Goff ended up with a degree from the University of Oklahoma.

Each returned to Mena and married in the late 1920s, and it looked for a time as though they’d become the kind of small-town pillars Sinclair Lewis wrote about in Babbitt and Main Street, working as minor-league businessmen and exercising their penchant for creativity by entertaining their peers at the local Elks Lodge and American Legion Hall.

Minstrel routines performed in blackface were all the rage in that particular time and place, and Chet and Tuffy became locally known for their version of that once-popular form of entertainment. In early 1931, when fundraising efforts to help victims of severe Arkansas flooding grew to include a charity broadcast featuring talent from several different counties, the two were sent to a Hot Springs station to strut their comedic stuff . Although they planned to make their radio debut as purveyors of feigned negritude, Lauck and Goff decided at the last minute to instead do a riff on the old-timey cookstove philosophers they’d been around all their lives.

And so, on station KTHS, Lum Edwards (sometimes spelled “Eddards” or “Edards”) and Abner Peabody were born. Three months later, Lum and Abner made its national network debut on NBC. And while the boys would bounce around a bit during their first couple of years, they would settle in to become one of the top comedy teams of the 1930s and ’40s. In fact, they became so well known in their first five years that they were responsible for an entire town changing its name.

If you decide to experience the Lum and Abner Museum for yourself, don’t bother trying to search Google for “Pine Ridge”—even though, as Kathy Stucker makes very clear, it’s a real place. Google Maps will insist that the museum and Jot ’Em Down Store is in Oden—a town just down the road that definitely isn’t Pine Ridge.

“Right now, we have 21 people in downtown Pine Ridge, including four children,” Kathy says. “You read so often in the histories that the [Lum and Abner] programs are based on the fictional
town of Pine Ridge. It’s the other way around. The fictional setting on the radio was based on the real town of Pine Ridge. It’s been a living community, with, at one time, two general stores, the gristmill, the sawmill, the blacksmith shop. This isn’t a fictional town. These are real people.”

As Lum and Abner, respectively Lauck and Goff , set their bucolic adventures in Pine Ridge, they based many of the supporting characters (which they also played) on actual residents of the town then known as Waters, named after its first postmaster. Although the names were usually changed, one of the major characters was a storekeeper named Dick Huddleston. Impersonated by Goff on the programs, Dick Huddleston was a real man who owned a store in Waters.

After a couple of years, Lum and Abner had gotten so popular that tourists were showing up from all over to check out Huddleston and his establishment for themselves. The fact that there
was no actual Pine Ridge threw a lot of people off, though. Even when they found the store, it seemed to be in the wrong town.

That was all changed in 1936, the year of the program’s fifth anniversary. On April 26, Lauck and Goff returned to their home state to receive a gubernatorial proclamation renaming the Waters Post Office “Pine Ridge.” Several of the townspeople whose counterparts appeared in Lum and Abner, including Huddleston, were on hand for the big event, which included a live broadcast.

“This has never been an incorporated town,” she says, “so the name of the post office is its only official name.”

The renaming festivities were held in the state capital of Little Rock instead of Waters/Pine Ridge. According to Kathy Stucker’s booklet Hello, This Is Lum and Abner (on sale at the store), that was because “electricity was still 10 years and many miles away” from Lum and Abner’s hometown at the time.

The Stuckers still have the original post office window from 1886, and mail still goes in and outndaily from the store. You can buy and send out a picture postcard of Pine Ridge, hand-stamped and
signed by Kathy, from there to anywhere in the world.

***

From the actual Lum and Abner script for December 7, 1933, in which Lum dispenses political pointers to Abner, who’s running for Pine Ridge constable:

Lum: Now in the first place you want to speak to everbody. Call em by their given names if you know it, and shake hands with everbody you can. Ask em bout all their relations and brag on em.

Abner: Yea.

Lum: Are you puttin them things down like I told you.

Abner: Yea dont go so fast.

Lum: When you go to church Sunday. You want to stand around and speak to everbody when they drive up. If they’re drivin a car step over and open the door for em and hep the wimmen fokes out.

Abner: What if they’re drivin a team and wagon.

Lum: Why thats all the better. You get to tie their team for em thataway. Thats a sure fire vote gitter. Might even brag on their team a little. Tell em what a fine lookin span of mules they’ve got.

Abner: If they’re drivin horses I dont want to say that huh?

Lum: No.

Abner: I didn’t think I would.

Lum: Then the thing to do is hep the wimmen fokes down outa the wagon or buggy or whatever they’re drivin and if they’ve got a baby with em hits a lot better. You want to insist on holdin the baby and then talk about what a beautiful child it is.

Abner: Brag on all the babies huh?

Lum: Yea if the mother’s holdin it say how much it looks like her.

Abner: And if the father’s holdin it you want me to say it looks like him huh?

Lum: That’s the idy exactly. And if they’re both standin ther say it looks like both of em.

***

Until the late 1940s, when it went Hollywood with guest stars and a studio audience, Lum and Abner was a fifteen-minute, low-key, episodic program, with storylines that sometimes ran for several weeks. It’s these shows that are most prized by aficionados, including the veteran Tulsa-based country-music producer, manager, and agent Ray Bingham, a huge fan for many years.

“In those early episodes, you can hear their rocking chairs creaking,” he says. “There’s no canned laughter or anything. Those shows are the best.”

When he’s traveling to a show that’s a good distance away, he’ll often grab several episodes on disc and listen to them all the way up and back. Bingham says that they never get old.

***

Thanks to the advances of technology, not to mention satellite radio, Lum and Abner programs are pretty easy to access on the Internet, CD, or even cassette tape. The Stuckers say that while many of their thousands of visitors a year are middle-aged and older, a fair amount of under-forties know about Pine Ridge’s most famous citizens. They can hear all the shows they want at the museum, where episodes run more or less constantly on a big, archaic reel-to-reel tape player.

“There are a lot of young people who are kind of turned off by what’s on television and radio now, and with everything being electronic,” says Kathy. “They want to go back to the good old days.”

“It’s nothing derogatory, nothing dirty,” adds her husband, referring to the show. “It’s just clean, honest humor.”

“We have a Mennonite community here, and for those kids and even the adults, this is something they could come in and listen to,” Kathy notes. “Even the old-time hardcore ones, who weren’t allowed to have radios, could come in here and listen to our tapes of Lum and Abner.”

***

From Lum and Abner and Their Friends from Pine Ridge, a 1932 radio-premium booklet written by Lauck and Go (and available in facsimile edition at the Jot ‘Em Down Store, along with an array of other items): “Each character [in Lum and Abner] stands apart from the rest as a distinct type but there is one outstanding trait characteristic of them all: love for their fellow man.”

***

There’s precious little love on the radio airwaves these days. A flip through the AM spectrum—where Lum and Abner, The Shadow, The Jack Benny Show, and many others once brought fun and joy to millions of homes—yields a ghastly and depressing parade of sour gasbags apparently devoid of any vestige of restraint. Although, knuckleheads like these have been around since the beginning of radio. Check out the career of the anti-Semitic ranter Father Charles Edward Coughlin, whose cranky broadcasts ran during some of the same years as Lum and Abner. Lum and Abner were the exception rather than the rule. That all changed with the rise of Rush Limbaugh in the early ’90s. Now, the airwaves overflow with Limbaugh manqués, stuffed into the frequencies like so many bloated, diseased sardines.

The impropriety and meanness long ago spread into sports talk, the other bastion of current AM radio, where a syndicated air horn recently referred to the young men on a college football defensive unit as “a big bowl of suck.” Disagree with these people on any point, and you’re an idiot. Or worse.

There is no “love for their fellow man” here, no sense that we’re all part of something bigger than ourselves. It’s been suggested that programs like Lum and Abner, Amos ’n’ Andy, and The Goldbergs helped Americans live through the Great Depression by reinforcing a needed sense of community. They certainly perpetuated some ethnic and geographic stereotyping as well, but they gave listeners the sense that despite our differences, we were all brothers and sisters under the skin. We could work together to make things better, and we would help one another when it was needed.

“You want to be their friend,” says Ray Bingham of Lum and Abner, “and you think they are your friends.” Try to find some AM radio figure to apply that sentiment to now. Try to find a voice there, a persona, you could reasonably call beloved. Do that for only a few moments, and you’ll probably come to realize why a dusty little museum devoted to a pair of comics who left the ether nearly 60 years ago still draws young and old from all over the globe. Lum and Abner’s heyday may not have been the greatest time for America, but it sure as hell was a better time for radio.

Originally published in This Land, Vol. 4, Issue 6. March 15, 2013.

“Tell all the people that Alex Posey is out here and about to be drowned and to come out and bring about three or four hundred feet of rope.”

“The past is a foreign country,” said the British novelist L.P. Hartley. “They do things differently there.” It’s the country where you can take a passenger train from Muskogee to Eufaula, which is what Alexander Posey, the famous Creek poet, political humorist, and newspaper man, is doing on the morning of May 27, 1908. He is accompanied by Robert Howe, a representative for the Galbreath Oil Company of Tulsa. They are going to finalize some business involving drilling on Posey’s land outside Eufaula. Posey is, at this time, editor of the Eufaula Indian Journal.

•••

The train slowed to a stop as it approached a river crossing just a few miles from Eufaula. The river was known to Posey and the Creeks as the Oktahutchee, to Howe and the whites as the North Canadian. It was in flood and had washed out the tracks. Posey knew and loved the Oktahutchee. He lived near it. He’d grown up near it, had swum it, canoed it, fished it, and written poems to it.

 Tho’ I sing my song in a minor key,
Broad lands and fair attest the good I do;
 Tho’ I carry no white sails to the sea,
Towns nestle in the vales I wander thro’;
And quails are whistling in the waving grain,
And herds are scattered o’er the verdant plain.

—from “Song of the Oktahutchee” by Alexander Posey

It was about eight o’ clock in the morning. The flooding river, backed up by the railroad’s berm, had found a weak spot where it had washed out the roadbed. This caused the track to sag, and the water was flowing both over and under it. The breach was relatively narrow, so the thick, brown water was forced through at high velocity.

A small settlement named Cathay had formed near the river crossing. Although Cathay was known at the time, its tenure on the earth was so brief it never seems to have caught the the attention of cartographers. That morning, residents of Cathay and stranded travelers gathered along the river in loose knots to watch the flood and see what might happen next.

Two local residents, Joel Scott and Tom Brannon, were standing nearby as Posey and Howe considered their options. Posey offered to hire Scott and Brannon to row them across, if they could get a boat. While Scott and Brannon went to fetch a boat, Posey walked over to a nearby farmhouse to have breakfast. Howe had already eaten, so he kept a watch for their boatmen’s return. They returned in about three hours with what Howe later described to the Muskogee Times-Democrat as “a very neat little skiff about 16 feet long.”

As Posey and Howe watched Scott and Brannon pull the boat downstream toward them, Howe suggested to Posey that they let some other stranded men go first. “They said they were good swimmers and good boatmen,” he explained.

Posey wasn’t deterred. “No, Bob, it’s safe enough.” He had rowed down this river many times before. “Let’s you and I go on…for if we wait it will be night before we get to Eufaula. If we go now we can attend to all of our business by evening” Posey stepped into the boat, made his way to the bow and, turning to face the back, sat on the seat. He was wearing a tailored gray suit, with a black vest and tie. In his tie he wore a horseshoe stickpin of emeralds and pearls, and on his head, no doubt, a stylish fedora. He smiled back at Howe. “Are you going?” he asked. The swift river tugged impatiently at the bow.

***

In the turbulent years before Oklahoma Territory and Indian Territory were unified into the newly minted state of Oklahoma, there was a push among the Five Civilized Tribes for separate statehoods. Tribal delegates convened in the summer and fall of 1905 in Muskogee, where they hammered out a constitution for the proposed state, to be named Sequoyah. The constitution they created for the proposed State of Sequoyah was signed by Chairman Chief Pleasant Porter and Secretary Alexander Posey , in McAlester on October 14, 1905. Although their bid for a separate statehood failed, their proposed constitution greatly influenced the constitution of Oklahoma.

Posey, educated at Bacone College, had risen to prominence in the territories, and beyond, as the editor of the Eufaula Indian Journal.

During his tenure there, he’d become famous for the Fus Fixico letters, presented by Posey (with a broad wink to readers) in the form of letters to the editor. The “letters” were supposedly written by a Fus Fixico, in the form of a conversation between Fixico and several other fictional Indian characters. The humorous dialogues—Posey’s own barbed satires of territorial politics—became popular reading in the territories and beyond. Periodicals as distant as the London Times asked to print them. Will Rogers would become prolific as a newspaper columnist, but Posey was first.

•••

Posey and Howe, and their oarsmen, Scott and Brannon, pushed off. They started off paddling diagonally upstream, away from the breach. Once they reached the main channel, the oarsmen began to struggle against the current. Scott lost his paddle. Brannon began frenziedly rowing in a hopeless eff ort to regain control. In his panic, he too dropped his paddle into the river.

The boat immediately got sidewise and began accelerating into the main current. They would have been swept into the breach in the tracks if they hadn’t first collided with the railroad right-of-way fence. When the boat smashed into the fence, all four men leaped out and over the fence. The boat broke up and sank within seconds. The men found themselves bobbing in shoulder-deep water, floating rapidly downstream.

In his book Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, Laurence Gonzales identifies the characteristics of disaster survivors. Among other traits, survivors quickly accept the reality of what has happened to them. This acceptance enables them to keep their head, assess the situation accurately, and take the decisive actions necessary to increase their chances of survival. Howe possessed these traits. Today, we have his perspective on what happened because he lived to tell the tale. When the powerful current threw Posey and Howe together, Posey instinctively reached out and took hold of Howe’s hand.

“No, Alex!” Howe yelled, “We must not take hold of each other!” Howe pushed away from him, into the main current. As they separated, Howe continued over his shoulder, “Get on top, Alex! Swim, Alex! Get out in the middle!” He couldn’t tell if Posey heard him.

Scott was already in the main current being pulled to the breach. He was facing downstream, his feet down, struggling to get his footing. When he got to the place where the tracks
sank under the water, he was dragged under. He got tangled in the dangling tracks and debris, went under, and drowned.

Howe began to swim, getting his body up onto the surface enough that, when he shot through the breach, he was propelled over the sagging track.

He’d swum another fifty yards downstream when he spotted, off to his right, Scott’s body floating on its back. “I saw that he was dead, as his mouth was open and the water was streaming into it,” he would later report. “Then it was I deeply realized that there was not much chance for me to get out. I realized that it was only a matter of time until I would drown, as I was exhausted from coming through this raging current, but at the same time I kept swimming.”

Howe turned toward the bank and within three feet he found the bottom. As he struggled to stand and wade, Scott’s body floated past him. When Howe looked around to see what had become of Posey, he thought he saw him sitting on the track. He waded through the water, angling toward the bank and as much upstream toward the track as his diminished strength would allow. After about twenty yards, he saw Brannon shoot through the breach in the same way that he had. He watched Brannon find the bottom and wade to the bank, where he collapsed, exhausted but alive.

“I got on the railroad completely broken down both physically and nervously,” Howe remembered, “and started up the road north to where I thought Alex was sitting. When I looked up I saw that he was standing out in the current about thirty feet from the track to the northwest and about twenty feet from where this terrible current went over and under the railroad, holding to a little sprout not larger than the handle of an umbrella, with three small prongs to it.”

* * *

My Fancy

Why do trees along the river
Lean so far out o’er the tide?
Very wise men tell me why, but
I am never satisfied;
And so I keep my fancy still,
 That trees lean out to save
The drowning from the clutches of
 The cold, remorseless wave.

—Alexander Posey

Several dozen onlookers had gathered on the banks. Howe circulated frantically among them, pleading for someone to run to Eufaula, about three miles away. “Tell all the people that Alex Posey is out here and about to be drowned and to come out and bring about three or four hundred feet of rope,” he pleaded. But those he asked refused. Howe then resolved to run to Eufaula himself and bring back help. Before he left, he called out to Posey and asked him if he could hold on. Posey looked back over his shoulder and smiled at Howe. “Yes,” Posey assured him.

Rushing toward town, Howe encountered some men who had a boat, which they quickly fetched and brought to the bank. Still, they needed rope. Two bystanders agreed to go to Eufaula for it.

Before the two men returned, about thirty minutes later, a train arrived with a forty-man work crew onboard to see what could be done to repair the track. When the engineer saw Posey out in the water hanging on, he uncoupled the engine and rushed it back to Eufaula for rope. After another twenty minutes, the train returned with about 400 feet of rope. Posey had by then been holding on to the twig for nearly two hours.

They tied the boat upstream and fed it down along the rope, with a Mr. Coppick onboard, but they ended about five feet short of Posey. Coppick tossed him a line. Posey caught it. For a moment he held the rope in his left hand and the twig in his right. Then, he let go of the twig. When he did, the swift current threw him out in the stream directly behind the boat about four feet, but he still stood on his feet. He attempted to pull himself into the boat, but as he made the pull his feet flew out from under him and left him dragging behind the boat.

“I can’t pull myself into the boat!” Posey yelled up at Coppick, arching his head back to keep the river water out of his mouth, “Pull me in!” When Coppick began pulling, Posey’s hands began to slip along the rope.

“He then turned his head and looked toward the bank where we were standing,” Howe later reported, “and turning and looking back down the stream towards this awful current that was going over and under the railroad track, he opened his hands and passed out of sight…”

Howe’s summary: “This is the true story of the awful death of the greatest Creek Indian of this country, the most polished newspaper man in the State, and a writer of prose and poetry whose equal in his line we have never known.”

As many as a hundred people had watched Posey drown.

* * *

Posey’s remains weren’t found until July 20—nearly two months later—after the fl ood had receded. His body was discovered by Jud Newton, who’d been out squirrel hunting. Posey’s widow, Minnie, buried him in Green Hill Cemetery in Muskogee.

The place where he drowned is itself gone now, too. The small, lush river towns in that foreign country of the past, where they do things differently, are drowned. The farms there, with their pastures and herds and bottomland fields, are drowned. The farmhouses down along the river, where you can walk up unannounced and expect to get breakfast—all drowned.

The song of the Oktahutchee itself has been drowned out, under the enormous, implacable, irresistible weight of Oklahoma’s “Gentle Giant,” Lake Eufaula.

Originally published in This Land, Vol. 4 Issue 6. March 15, 2013.

This is my mother’s favorite Oklahoma history textbook. It smells like Parmesan cheese. Copyright 1934, 1949. Picture the Council Oak Tree. Catty-corner from the tree, a weather-beaten parking lot and at the edge of the parking lot, a dumpster. In the dumpster, old books. Brick-red, hardcover copies of Victor Harlow’s Oklahoma.

Harlow is succinct, swift. Small focused sections with useful boldfaced subheads. It’s like one of those sleek Art Deco fire stations we have. I’m particularly thinking of the one at 36^th and Lewis.

2. Riot and Remembrance
by Hirsch, James S. 

It’s not Pennington’s. It’s more Hard Rock Casino. It’s slick, black and gold, easy. The first chapter of Riot and Remembrance contains maybe the most gripping, rapid, informative history of Tulsa out there. It’s like driving up the rim of Tulsa on 169, crossing over the BA, and suddenly finding yourself hit up the Inner Dispersal Loop into the old neighborhoods out toward Gilcrease.

Admittedly, some of the rest of the book feels like sitting through an evening school-board meeting at the Education Service Center. And coming out into that big endless parking lot off 31^st Street, and wondering how you ended up on the moon.

3. I Remember
by Brainard, Joe.

When you first start to read it, it’s like Bell’s Amusement Park circa 1992. Skeeball. My dad and little brother and I are crossing the midway, on our way to the old flea market buildings. Where the taffy machines are. In the crowd in front of us there’s some guy in a T-shirt that reads, “Do It Till You Can’t Walk.”

Later, it’s like the 41^st Street Barnes & Noble. With that utter wall of magazines. If you spent all afternoon there, riveted to one of those backless benches.

4. Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers
by Padgett, Ron.

There’s supposed to be a tunnel between the Mid-Continent Tower and other similar office buildings. But what if that tunnel went all the way out to Ron Padgett’s childhood home?

Where that is I’m not actually sure. I’m picturing Peoria north of Cherry Street. Or further east. Near Tally’s, maybe—behind there. Or further north. In somebody’s patchy front yard, a trap door you can heave up, like a vault. The mouth of a polished granite tunnel with electric torchieres. If only the young Ron Padgett or his friend the young Joe Brainard had ever noticed this.

5. Funny Money
by Singer, Mark.

The Sam’s Club on Sheridan used to be just a Wal-Mart. And it was the only Wal-Mart in town. OK, go back in time to that Wal-Mart. Carefully inspect the merchandise. Think about distribution. Raw materials. Go into the Home & Garden section and sniff the fertilizer.

This book is actually about Oklahoma City and the collapse of Penn Square Bank. But if you want to be in Oklahoma City all you have to do is go and hang out for a while on that treeless plaza that sits like an empty cafeteria tray between the downtown library and the courthouse. If you sit there on that sun-struck concrete for long enough (i.e., until you go blind), Tulsa seems just like Oklahoma City.

6. The Outsiders
by Hinton, Susan Eloise. 

A prefab classroom. Tulsa Public Schools must have ordered three dozen in about 1985. Every school seems to have two or three, each with a little porch, and a classroom on either side. And in at least one of those classrooms, a class is being taught The Outsiders.

The entire plot of The Outsiders was played out over a two-year period in middle school. Every day we were bused up there to the North Side, for the sole purpose of someone somewhere in the building being just like Pony Boy, for two seconds, daily, between the passing of the first and second lunch periods.

7. Tulsa
by Clark, Larry. 

There’s an early part where they’re in the woods. I always envisioned this somewhere convenient, some lost West Side creek, probably now Tulsa Hills or a similar bummer. Et in Arcadia ego. But inside the houses. The picture where they’re all happy, shooting up at somebody’s mom’s house. Sears Roebuck sold all those houses out of a catalog, and I’ve been in them. You have too.

Nobody told me about this book until I left town.

Michael Wallis is Oklahoma’s most famous connoisseur of Route 66 and the American West. His name has appeared on the cover of more than a dozen books, above articles in publications like the New York Times and the New Yorker, and in the credits of feature films. The Pulitzer nominee lives in Tulsa with his wife, Suzanne, well within earshot of the Mother Road. Photo taken by Terrence Moore in Guadalajara, Mexico in 1981. Used courtesy The Wallis Collection.

Originally published in This Land, Vol. 4, Issue 6. March 15, 2013.

* * *

PLAYMATE: Michel Foucault
BIRTHDATE: October 15, 1926
BIRTHPLACE: Poitiers, France
BUST: 32’’
WAIST: 32’’
HIPS: 32’’
HEIGHT: 6’1’’
WEIGHT: 178 lbs
AMBITIONS: To become important, but not so important that I forget who I really am inside.
TURN-ONS: Beach parties, prison movies, and Mexico
TURN-OFFS: When Americans talk about social scrutiny. Yech.
MY FRIENDS KNOW: I love to have fun and travel. I’m all about fun. My nickname is Fou, which means crazy in French.
IN MY SPARE TIME: I like to sway back and forth, pretending I’m a pendulum. I get great ideas that way.
A GREAT DATE: A parade, and a movie after.
THE PERFECT MEAL: Mexican food, or Italian. And churros. I love churros.
FAVORITE ENTERTAINERS: Robert Redford, Joan Baez, Led Zeppelin, Crosby, Stills and Nash.
MY PHILOSOPHY: I used to think that society operated on all these principles of exclusion, and you could quantify social values that way, but now I just believe whatever happens happens, and there’s no reason to worry.

* * *

PLAYMATE: Ayn Rand
BIRTHDATE: February 2, 1905
BIRTHPLACE: St. Petersburg, Russia
BUST: 17’’
WAIST: 20’’
HIPS: 18’’
HEIGHT: 4’7’’
WEIGHT: 84 lbs
AMBITIONS: I want to write Hollywood movies someday.
TURN-ONS: You don’t want to know.
TURN-OFFS: Do-gooders and niceguy types. Gimme a rebel anyday.
VIRTUES: Egocentric, self-absorbed, individualistic.
VICES: Once in a while I do something altruistic and I get so ashamed.
WHY I COULD NEVER BE PRESIDENT: I hyperventilate when I have to talk in front of a crowd.
MY PHILOSOPHY: Live it up, but don’t do anything you’ll regret when you’re 80.

ME HEAD was a free-press zine that was launched in 2000 and distributed in Tulsa, Dallas, Austin, and Phoenix. It featured early works from several writers who have since contributed to This Land. During peak periods of its brief circulation, it boasted 300,000 online readers a month. Only three of the six issues were circulated in print. In 2013, This Land Press will publish the collected works of Me Head.

Published in This Land, Vol. 4, Issue 6. March 15, 2013.

The first conversation I had when I arrived was with my cab driver—a pseudochivalrous Texan expat—as he took me from the airport to my new apartment on the west side of the Arkansas River. He asked my opinion of violence when employed in the defense of a woman. He told me about a big Indian man (as in native to America) he’d laid out in a parking lot after the man had smacked his girlfriend in front of the cabbie. Because of a cluster of papilloma that had emerged on my vocal cords over the summer, and a deep indifference toward what I imagined was a greatly exaggerated story, my responses were limited to inflected grunts.

As we crossed the Arkansas River, I recalled mu recently ex-girlfriend’s conviction that Oklahoma was home only to gun nuts and religious fanatics. (A belief founded on a handful of drives through the Sooner State on family road trips; hearing her, one might imagine they barely made it through to Texas, crossing the state line with car doors pockmarked by bullet holes and the windshield obscured by evangelists’ pamphlets.) I tried to dismiss this notion as the ignorant fear mongering it was. Time and again, people—and Tulsa itself—met me with open arms and promise. But, worn down by a slew of surgeries and feeling lonely, I turned inward and dwelled deeply on What Should Have Been, romanticized versions of my ex-girlfriend’s life in Boston, and self-pity. Four months of this defeatist brew culminated in an anti-climax. I did not rise to meet the challenges of a new city but unceremoniously dropped out of law school and moved to my parents’ house in Illinois.

A year and a half later, in Chicago, I met Ben Lytal for coffee at an Intelligentsia near Millennium Park. I had seen Lytal’s first novel, A Map of Tulsa, mentioned on a most-anticipated list for 2013 and immediately felt a kinship. Since I’d left, Tulsa had evolved into a totem of my post-graduate transition into “real life.” A self-idealized proving ground that had found me wanting and spit me back onto my parent’s couch and into a software sales job in The Loop. The aforementioned ex was dumping me again after a short, financially damaging attempt at a long-distance relationship, and, tapping into a life-long belief that books and music can solve any crisis I encounter, I was looking for Lytal’s novel to bring some closure to the pattern I’d begun in San Francisco.

And it did, somewhat. A Map of Tulsa is a tribute to both the city of Tulsa and the unfortunate men and women (boys and girls) who forge relationships from naiveté and insecurity with the best intentions of finding love. A breed of the disastrous relationship we’ve all watched implode from afar, or been privy to as a combusting agent.

I arrived at Intelligentsia an hour early and settled into a corner by the front door. I jotted crude observations of my surroundings trying to dispel any nervous anticipation, e.g., dancers twirling by the windows in a studio above a crêpes shop across the street, arms positioned parallel to their heads, elbows arched out to form parentheses; every guy in here has a beard and all the girls are wearing glasses. I made a note to ask Ben about the three-way scene.

As another patron entered, I’d glance from the corner of my eye with a look of feigned disinterest, in case it was Lytal. He arrived, wearing a fuzzy maroon sweater over a button up. I was able to identify him by the mussed black hair and glasses of his Twitter profile.

We shook hands, exchanged greetings and he mentioned that he’d considered inviting me to his home for the interview, but his wife had been concerned about their privacy. Being a judge’s son, I sympathized with her pessimism. Still, I couldn’t help but feel touched.

Lytal had never been interviewed, and minus a smattering of indie bands I’d talked with for my college’s radio station, I had never interviewed anyone. This shared frontier served as a momentary remedy to my performance anxiety, until I remembered his pedigree.

Lytal has had a fairly prolific career writing for publications such as The Believer and The Nation. Though a Tulsa native, he spent a decade living in New York City before his move to Chicago last year. He now teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago. While living in New York, Lytal worked at The New Yorker, taught at the Pratt Institute, and wrote a column on new fiction for The New York Sun. Apart from a summer in 2004, Lytal hasn’t lived in Tulsa since he left for Harvard, though he noted with surprising confidence, “I could see myself living there one day.” He considered staying in Tulsa at one point during that summer, but he had a job waiting in New York.

The Tulsa represented in Lytal’s book is very different from the Tulsa of 2013. Set in the late ’90s, A Map of Tulsa channels an understanding of the city as Lytal experienced it growing up. For this debut novelist, it “seemed like a utopian dream to have more than one bar.” Lytal remembers an empty downtown, except on Sundays, when people of varying faiths would emerge from the suburbs and fill the streets on their way to worship. He would look at downtown Tulsa and think, “What is that? What is it for? Why do I go there?”

* * *

A Map of Tulsa reminds me of a song I listened to obsessively while living in the eponymous city. The last lyrics in the song are, “The first time / the last time / all the times in between / the first time / the last time / all the times I would’ve liked there to have been.”

Often I’ve glossed over important experiences in my life, naturally bookending them and assigning a narrative that elevated the daily eff ort of living. As is the typical case with big-hearted boys of poetry, Lytal’s narrator and protagonist, Jim, much like myself, becomes restless in situations where the emotional payoff is minimal or none, yet balks when confronted with true intimacy. Adrienne, the love interest and damaged heiress to oil money, wavers between idol and ideal, an evershifting receptor for Jim’s projections of Keatsian love. Jim maintains by compelling them toward such extremes as firing off a revolver in Adrienne’s art studio and a near threesome with her childhood friend-cum-protector, Chase. A wrenching contrast, Adrienne is simply happy meeting Jim’s parents and seeing his childhood home.

A Map of Tulsa is most powerful when it reads in the key of the last line of the song. Lytal tunes his sentences to reflect Jim’s tremendous nostalgia for a deeply personal and ultimately nonexistent Tulsa. A Tulsa built upon an equally nonexistent version of his girl Adrienne. A Tulsa that Jim would never have left.

* * *

Lytal struggled with his understanding of the city. He paraphrased advice William James had given to his brother, Henry, when he was living abroad: “You don’t understand Europe, you’re embarrassing yourself. Write about Boston.” In this sense, Lytal views A Map of Tulsa as an expat’s novel.

Part of Lytal’s college orientation was an icebreaker tailored to the background of each student. The orientation leaders pulled factoids from each freshman student’s geographical background and inserted them into the template, “X vs. X, who would win in ten rounds?” For Lytal, the hypothetical pugilists were S.E. Hinton of The Outsiders fame and fellow Tulsa native Larry Clark. When his orientation leader asked Lytal to call the bout for Hinton or Clark, he found himself thinking, “Who is Larry Clark?”

For those of you who share in young Lytal’s ignorance (and I was in this camp prior to my interview with him), Larry Clark is the Tulsa-born photographer behind Tulsa, a collection of black-and-white images published in 1971. The photographs were taken between 1963 and 1971 and document the youth of Tulsa engaged in a slew of compromising and provocative activities. Though
Hinton is no pushover, I’d have to put my money on the amphetamine addict who’s made it to seventy.

Originally, the book was set in New York City, but Tulsa was always in the back of Lytal’s mind. (For evidence, see his short story, “Weena,” in the eleventh issue of McSweeney’s. That piece seemed to anticipate A Map of Tulsa, coloring a post-apocalyptic Tulsa in the same ecstatic, dream-like tones.) Much like a first love, returning to one’s hometown, if only in spirit, offers those with romantic minds hope for a better understanding of self. This combined with long-dormant seeds left over from his freshman orientation might be found at the root of Lytal’s decision to switch the novel to Tulsa.

* * *

“Even though I had grown up in Tulsa, I felt more comfortable in New York. I was on the edge of understanding when it came to Tulsa,” he said. Beyond the desire to break from earlier work in short, experimental fiction, writing an outsider novel about Tulsa seemed to Lytal like a compelling challenge.

This sentiment is mirrored in Jim. One can’t help but get the feeling Jim spent most of his high school years seeking out extracurricular opportunities at the behest of his parents and then went on to achieve a well-balanced and attractive undergraduate resume. In the presence of Adrienne, Jim sees Tulsa as if for the first time. She belongs to the city in a way Jim, who grew up with the understanding he would leave Tulsa for school, never could.

“Choosing a city to live in becomes a dilemma,” Lytal said. “There seems to exist a particular sort of mobility nowadays. An ability to go away and come back again.” (A Map of Tulsa was originally titled The City I Chose.)

This could quickly veer into a discussion of class and privilege, which the author quickly acknowledged, but too numerous are the stories about Generations X and Y being reduced to a quivering support group of pill-popping neurotics because of exposure to an excess of choices. Instead, what I find interesting is how much of our formative years are spent feeding the anticipation of leaving home for college. And, whether it’s one year or four years later, what it’s like coming back to those who never left.

* * *

Around the time Ben and I noticed we were taking sips from empty mugs, I brought up the writing and publishing process behind A Map of Tulsa. I’d been thinking about first books a lot leading up to the interview. Two classmates of mine from Iowa were taking to Twitter to promote their debut publications, which left me feeling equal parts inadequate and curious. I don’t have a manuscript to sell, but something about the conflict between writing for oneself and being recognized for that work has always fascinated me. This applies to any of the creative disciplines really—painting, music, stand-up comedy, dance—anything fueled by transformation of self into art, I suppose. Lytal said a friend of his had asked him a similar question and was disappointed by the answer. Things have just worked out for Ben Lytal, which is not to say he hasn’t put in the time and paid his dues. He took a moment then said, “Opportunities like this were sort of the reason I moved to New York.”

Originally published in This Land, Vol. 4, Issue 6. March 15, 2013.

We embarked on an exploration of this question with Russell Cobb, This Land’s contributing editor who can’t find his socks. We talked with Ginger Strand, a New York-based writer who imposed herself for awhile on some Oklahoma fish biologists.

We followed the This Land Fiction Editor, Jeff Martin, as he wandered what he calls the Southern Plains, pulling new fiction from Alan Heathcock and John Crowley from the hard ground.

Lastly, Grammy-nominated musician John Fullbright offers thoughts between musical sets to tide us over until next week.

Articles discussed:

South by Midwest by Russell Cobb
Streetlamps by Alan Heathcock
Tom Mix by John Crowley

Related Links:

“All the Time in the World” by John Fullbright
Imaginary Oklahoma, the book

Featuring music from:

My Oklahoma Home – Bruce Springsteen
Chiyoko Szlavnics – Ophir Ilzetski (from freemusicarchive.org)
Pizz Violin at a Bay With Extraordinary Ambience – Jon Rose (from freemusic archive.org)
There is No There – The Books
Never Been to Spain – Three Dog Night
All the Time in the World – John Fullbright
Gawd Above – John Fullbright
Movin – John Fullbright

Subscribe to This Land Radio on iTunes here.

Most were middling, leaning toward positive. Reviewers praised his authentic use of language, his rip-roarin’ pace, his dramatic and detailed characters. He was hailed as a “born artist” and a “natural born poet.” Some found the book anticlimactic, others a bit corny. The New York Times Book Review at least managed a firm and simple statement: “Woody writes well.”

Woody’s chief concern, though, was how it was playing on Peoria. “I hear the good old Oklahoma papers are standing on their ears,” he wrote in a March 29, 1943, letter to his wife Marjorie. “ They put out a 3 column spread about it, saying it was another ‘Literary Black Eye For Oklahoma.’ I guess I’ll be getting lots of letters from all of my old friends down in there. Hope so. But the clippings from other states are going to be just as good and bad. If none of the papers panned it I’d be feeling awful guilty.”

But Bound for Glory was successful enough that Woody nearly swapped his Martin for an Underwood. As Joe Klein reported in his biography Woody Guthrie: A Life, Woody’s publisher planned to work with him on “several more books.” He quickly was awarded a contract for a second, tentatively titled I Want to Be Right, with a $500 advance and a planned publication date of October 1, 1943. By May, according to another biographer, Ed Cray (Ramblin’ Man), Woody had landed an $1,800 fellowship to allow him to “write books, ballads, songs, and novels that will help people to know each other’s work better.”

If you’ve read this far, you likely know something of Woody’s meandering history—so you know things didn’t quite go as planned.

Woody wouldn’t see another of his books published, and it’s a minor miracle we’re seeing House of Earth, Woody’s long-lost third manuscript, finally published last month in a nifty edition from (say wha?) Johnny Depp. As is usual when it comes to Guthrie, there’s a detective story involved.

THE BIRTH OF EARTH


The second book dogged Woody the rest of his days. This one is an exaggerated story about a hunt for a silver mine in the wastes of southwest Texas, and it’s based, very loosely, on just such a trip Woody took with some family members in 1931. The trip was difficult, boring, and unsuccessful. The book, frankly, does little to counter those same adjectives. But Woody labored over the manuscript for years, rewriting frequently and desperately trying—like some of the hungry Okies in his songs—to make a tasty meal from bare cupboards. When he checked himself into the Brooklyn State Hospital in 1954, his e ects included a paper bag containing a shirt, some writing paper, and the latest draft of what eventually was published by Dutton in 1976 as Seeds of Man: An Experience Lived and Dreamed.

In 1947, the third book sprouted from an idea Woody had kept simmering for a decade. Cray mentions Woody started writing a draft that he called “another lifebound novel real and unreal.”  The new
story was, for a change, not first-person reverie, but a simple character study of a struggling couple on a dusty farm in the Texas panhandle. He knocked out 160 pages, which knocked out his mentor, folklorist Alan Lomax. “There was a moment in my life,” Lomax later recalled to Klein, “when I considered dropping everything I was doing, and just helping Woody get published. It was, quite simply, the best material I’d ever seen written about that section of the country.” Both biographers, however, report that Woody quickly became distracted and abandoned the manuscript after two chapters.

Not so, it turns out.

In fact, Woody completed four chapters of House of Earth—a complete story, though more of a novella than a full novel—and apparently had his sights set on Hollywood. There had been some talk of turning Seeds of Man into a movie, and Woody sent the four finished chapters of House of Earth to Irving Lerner, a filmmaker who’d caught Woody’s eye with his documentaries (socially conscious films like Valley Town in 1940 and The Land in 1942, but also perhaps 1943’s Oscar-nominated short Swedes in America, featuring one of Woody’s amorous lyrical fixations, Ingrid Bergman).

But the film project never materialized, and the single draft of House of Earth languished amid Lerner’s possessions. Later, when his estate reorganized Lerner’s papers, the manuscript was discovered and, before the Woody Guthrie Archives was established, sent to the University of Tulsa’s McFarlin Library for permanent safekeeping.

There it sat until Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley picked up the trail a few years ago. Brinkley had interviewed Bob Dylan for a Rolling Stone article, and Dylan had talked at length about Woody and Lomax. A curious Brinkley dug into Lomax’s writings and found mention of House of Earth along with his effusive praise of the manuscript. But the chapters were not among the collection at the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York. So Brinkley managed to track it down and sought to realize Lomax’s original desire to get it published.

Enter actor Johnny Depp. Brinkley is the literary executor for the works of Hunter S. Thompson. He edited the three-volume collection of Thompson’s letters. Depp was also an admirer and friend of the late gonzo journalist, starring in two film adaptations of his books (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Rum Diary) and narrating an acclaimed documentary, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. In 2008, a  ve-CD box set was issued as an audio companion to the film, for which Depp and Brinkley collaborated on the liner notes and earned a Grammy nomination for their efforts.

Brinkley’s unearthing of House of Earth also coincided with a new project of Depp’s. He’d set up his own imprint with Brinkley’s longtime publisher, HarperCollins, and he was looking for manuscripts that resonated with this aesthetic—that of a bold actor who, you know, hung out with Hunter S. Thompson, formed his own band (with members of the Butthole Surfers, Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Sex Pistols), and in an interview once courted some manufactured controversy by referring to the United States of America as a “dumb puppy.” So House of Earth is the inaugural title for Depp’s publishing arm, Infinitum Nihil.

HOUSE OF THE RISING SON

House of Earth is the ultimate Red Dirt tale. Like so much of Woody’s work, the narrative is deeply didactic. While scratching out a living in Pampa, Texas, in the 1930s, Woody—ever the astute observer of his fellow folks—recognized many of the woes suffered by those eking out some semblance of subsidence from the region’s dry, dusty land. Hand-in-hand with the good ol’ government, Woody thought he had a solution to at least one of them. House of Earth developed into a rather clever sermon about a little bit of salvation from the ground right under our feet.

In 1936, Woody had visited a pueblo outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The adobe construction fascinated him. The bricks, made from sun-dried earth and clay, had lasted generations. They kept their interiors cool in the blazing Southwest heat and insulated them from frigid winter blasts. He went back home to Pampa and couldn’t help notice that everyone, himself included, was huddled within houses made instead from timber. Wood, besides being a scarce resource on the Southern Great Plains, often warped, didn’t seal well between boards, and was a banquet for the plentiful termites. Why, Woody wondered, weren’t we learning lessons from the Native Americans and living in dwellings made of and in harmony with the land?

He began preaching this gospel in letters in 1937. The book’s introduction, co-written by Brinkley and Depp, quotes one such missive to the actor Eddie Albert (yep, the Green Acres guy, whom Woody had met and befriended the previous year while in Los Angeles), in which Woody mentions sending away for a government pamphlet—a manual with instructions for any unskilled laborer on the building of an adobe house. “You dig you a cellar and mix the mud and straw right in there,” Woody wrote, “sorta with your feet, you know, and you get the mud just the right thickness and you put it in a mould, and you mould out around 20 bricks a day, and in a reasonable length of time you have got enough to build your house.”

The idea came back to him a decade later while traveling back through the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. In an April 1947 letter to Marjorie (among others in the Archives), Woody mentions hitchhiking through Pampa, Amarillo, and Dalhart on his way toward Denver and points northwest. Along the way, he heard many tales of the April 9, 1947, tornado—one of the deadliest in the region’s history—slashing a 221-mile gash across Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas and killing nearly 200 people. In the letter, Woody connected his own memories of life on these plains to his age-old adoration of adobe: “I was the folks that are so poor that got killed in these shack buildings and shack houses. We need to build sodwall, thicker brick, tile and steel houses. A good dugout adobe cellar type house with walls 24 inches thick would have saved 90% of the lost lives in the wind.”

Shortly thereafter, the House of Earth draft emerged as a thinly veiled bit of proselytizing, a grown-up take on the ultimate moral of the  ree Little Pigs: Build a house out of bricks, and the wolf won’t stay at your door. Tike Hamlin is a poor dirt farmer who’s had the same epiphany. In the opening of House of Earth, Tike is giddy over a pamphlet that arrived in the mail: government instructions on building adobe houses. He spends the next nine months and 211 pages trying to convince his wife, the restless and intelligent Ella May, that they should get to building.

Nine months is not a coincidental timeline. “Dry Rosin,” the  rst chapter of House of Earth, is dominated by some serious sex. In typical Woody fashion, he manages to mix Tike’s lofty ideals with low-down sweet talk. As they complete the deed, Tike’s mind is already drifting, conflating his desires:

Ohh. Yes. That Department of Agriculture book was an awful mighty good thing, laying there at her elbow on the hay. But it made their biggest misery even bigger, and their biggest dream even plainer, and their biggest craving ten times more to be craved. A  reproof, windproof, dirtproof, bugproof, thiefproof house of earth. His penis had become limber, and her moving had forced it out of her hole.

It’s a pretty graphic 20 pages—not dirty, just full of unflinching detail—a literal roll in the hay written by someone who clearly was familiar with the details of making love in a barn (“Tike said curse words about the splinters of hay and straw that had dried and stuck on the hairs and skin of his stomach, crotch, and legs”). By the end of the book, a midwife is trying to keep the  filthy wood shack clean enough to deliver Ella May’s baby—another biological event Woody describes in further, fluid-filled detail. In the end, the newest Hamlin only underscores the couple’s need
for a solid home. Until the recent bursting of America’s real estate bubble, the desire to own one’s home had been a cornerstone of the American Dream. “This, Elly, ah, this is, I guess,” Tike manages, “what you can call our first stepstone to something real.”

“LITTLE SEXY PLEASURES”

Woody fans might blush at his frankness in the boudoir/barn—even I chuckled a bit upon encountering the f-word in prose from lil’ ol’ Woody—but Woody was never particularly delicate about natural
processes. His notebooks in the Archives include numerous considerations of the sex act, from some lengthy prose about sex after marriage called “Human Engineering” to a few pages in September 1952 on which he mulls “the various lines of homosexualities we hear about and see every minute around us” and concludes that “what little sexy pleasures I’ve still got left in me surely won’t ever ever be wasted on any other man. You can rest your little heart on that. (In case you ever wondered…..)”

Still, it’s interesting that this overt display of sexual detail shows up in a manuscript penned in 1947. In my own research at the Archives into the progression of Woody’s Huntington’s disease and the effect it had on his creative output, it was clear that around 1948 was when friends and family began noticing the more overt physical and mental changes in Woody, which they initially attributed to his increasing drunkenness. That was also the year Woody wrote a series of letters to a family friend that were so graphically sexual they resulted in a 1949 federal court case on charges of mailing “an obscene, lewd, and lascivious letter.”

Sex aside, though, not much happens in House of Earth. The remaining chapters—“Termites,” “Auction Block,” and “Hammer Ring”—are humdrum  reside chats (with lots of interior monologue) compared to the rollicking, visceral adventures of Bound for Glory. They’re also written by, literarily speaking, a more mature author. Bound for Glory was autobiography with a novelistic wink, and Seeds of Man labored over construction of the bridge between those experiences lived and dreamed, with laborious results. House of Earth hits the Goldilocks zone. Woody’s real-world concerns are clear enough, but Tike and Ella May might be the most fully realized and engaging characters Woody created, in song or story. The knack for sensory detail that brings a taste of grit to readers’ mouths and the feel of biting wind through a poorly papered crack in the wall also rounds out a relationship full of love, sorrow, and desperate hopes—complete with a clever, “Gift of the Magi” twist to the couple’s dreams midway through. The praise heaped on Bound for Glory for its mastery of dialogue and dialect still applies here. Like James Joyce, a writer Woody was often compared to, Woody manages to capture the sound of regional speech without miring readers in another language altogether.

Their well-drawn humanity transcends the story’s underlying didacticism so that House of Earth stands much more as a compelling and immersive tale than a merely dressed-up pamphlet on the virtues of adobe construction. As such, its universal message ends up aligning with contemporary environmentalism quaintly but squarely. Emotionally involved with these two characters, it’s a bit easier to endure the occasional lectures Tike and Ella May seem to give each other about the brutal tactics of banks, the socialist ideals of land ownership and how much sharecropping has in common with slavery.

If these are, indeed, people of the land, then the policies of capitalist government and business are metaphorically the wind and drought making it so hard for crops to grow. Though the text itself is a tad antediluvian and, like so much of Woody’s work, requires framing and context in order to really lift out its modern applications (tip: don’t skip the introduction), those applications are still present, and bold.

“It’s almost as if Guthrie had written House of Earth prophetically,” Brinkley and Depp write in the intro, “with global warming in mind.”

Originally published in This Land, Vol. 4 Issue 5. March 1, 2013.

This issue includes a piece about Lum and Abner, a radio show from the early 20th century. In this piece, author John Wooley suggests that radio is dead, killed by vitriol and too much talk.

Hoping to be part of radio’s rebirth, This Land Press debuts This Land Radio—an hour-long, statewide radio program that will bring to Oklahoma’s radio waves the same quality and thoughtfulness that our print publication offers.

Since its inception, This Land Press has included audio. That, in our minds, is what new media is all about; some stories are best told in the spoken word and with sounds, even if the technology is decades old and “dead” according to some. Radio is certain to change over the coming years as audiences migrate from automobile-based listening to time-shifted podcasts and other personalized usage patterns. Yet, serious audio journalism is as important today as it was in the 1930s and ’40s, and the best resides in public radio.

So that is where you’ll find This Land Radio.

During our short two-year history, our audio team has produced podcasts and story segments that have been distributed through PRX’s exchange of radio programs and as podcasts in the iTunes Store. Just this past fall, our Audio Producer Abby Wendle was one of four winners of the award for best short documentary at the Third Coast Audio Festival for an amazing piece of audio journalism titled “Glass, Not Glitter.” It outranked 180 submissions from 21 countries. Winners in other categories at that conference included All Things Considered, This American Life, Marketplace, Studio 360, and Radio Diaries.

The editor of the Missouri Review, the quarterly publication of the highly regarded journalism school at the University of Missouri, wrote about hearing “Glass, Not Glitter” at the awards ceremony:

It was a retrospective on the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. … It silenced the entire room.  This was a tremendous experience.  If you’ve ever had a moment at a reading, or a concert, or a speech, whatever it might be, when something takes all the air out of the room … well, it was just like that.  Beautiful, stunning, heart-wrenching, and amazing, all at once.

Given the consistent excellence of our audio productions, we launch This Land Radio on March 31. It will air on KOSU, the “uniquely Oklahoma” radio station of Oklahoma State University; The SpyFM in Oklahoma City; and later this year on KRSC, of Rogers State University. The program will include radio pieces that sometimes parallel our print articles and sometimes cut new ground.

Storytelling is humankind’s best way to capture context and some stories are best told in print, others in audio or video, and many in a variety of media, each capturing a particular perspective. As always, This Land’s stories will be unlike any others, seeking higher ground in quality and thoughtfulness, and always striving to give listeners a deeper understanding of Oklahoma.

Our audio producers are Abby Wendle and Sarah Geis. Abby’s previous audio work includes experience with WNYC’s RadioLab and The Takeaway, a co-production of Public Radio International and WNYC in collaboration with The New York Times and WGBH in Boston. She holds a master’s degree from the Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Sarah previously spent five years traveling the United States with the NPR-affiliated project StoryCorps, helping to collect and
archive more than 45,000 interviews with Americans.

On Sunday, March 31, at 1 p.m., please join us for the first episode of This Land Radio by tuning in to 91.7 KOSU in central Oklahoma (including Stillwater and Oklahoma City); 107.5 KOSN in Tulsa, Bartlesville, and the Grand Lake area; 107.3 in south Tulsa; and 101.9 in Okmulgee. You can listen anytime online at ThisLandPress.com/radio or thespyFM.com and each episode is available for free from iTunes or Stitcher.

Thanks for your support. Long live radio.

Vincent LoVoi, Publisher

Originally published in the March 15 edition of This Land.

One window was on each side, and there was an east door toward the windmill and the barn, and a west door out across a hard strip of grazing land as flat and just about as wide open as the green cloth top of a billiard table. Yet eighteen feet is eighteen feet, or as long as six wide steps of a short-legged man when he’s walking fairly on a beeline and comparatively sober. This was the vast and undying beauty, the dynamic and eternal attraction, the lure, the bait, the magnetic pull that, in addition to their blood kin and salty love for the wide open spaces and their lifetime bond to and worship of the land, caused not only Ella May and Tike Hamlin but hundreds of thousands and millions and millions of others, folks just about like them to scatter their seeds, their words, and their loves so freely here.

And out of these hard-hitting millions of people, still, all in all, no other two of them were quite exactly like Tike and Ella May. None of the other millions of faces were like Tike’s, and none of the other voices were like Ella’s. And even though more millions of these little sideleaning, termite-eaten, rotting and falling poison houses are everywhere around you, still, none of these bent, warped, sagged, reeled, rocked, nor swayed in the same places as this one, nor did the holes, cracks, splits, slits, misfits, openings, crevices, come in exactly the same place.

Eighteen feet is eighteen feet by any ruler, any yardstick in the land, but some shacks will soak full of dampness and rain and will spread out two or three inches in the course of forty running years. Others will dry out, lose their gum and rosin, and their natural sappy juice will get away into the air, and the hot sun will beat down on all four sides of them, and the dry winds will rip and tear at the boards and scatter the shingles across the earth, so that, say, after the same forty-odd years, this shack will shrivel up, and shrink in size three or four inches.

Tike and Ella’s shack did not come quite under either one of these descriptions, that is, the wet one that swelled, nor the dry one that shrank. It came more in the middle, and suffered all the more because of it. It stood up against the early spring rains that flooded the black gumbo furrows and made them look like the calm parts of the oceans. These spring rains came just on the tail end of hailstorms that pounded the green sprigs down with hailstones the size of turnips, even the looks, the shape, of turnips. Car tops are battered and the first leaves skinned off every stalk and every growing thing. The waters of storms flood down out of the skies and chew the hard plugged mud into a gummy slick black gumbo paste that stops all wagon wheels, all auto wheels, all tractor wheels. These waters reflect the colors of the clouds and the sun above for days and weeks as they stand on the roads and on the fields, because there are no man-made gutters here, no copper drains, no tin runways, no iron manholes, to carry the floods off the flatlands. Some, the soil drinks down to fill its veins, and some the wind scoops up to get drunk on, a bit the horses, hogs, and cattle drink down and splash in, and some the people stagger and bog along in. Still there are lakes and more lakes, flat, shallow holes of sky waters all over the plains, and the whiffs of the wind that blows off these waters feels like the forked tongue of winter.

These hailstorms, these floods, these falling and standing waters, all of them, every single drop of them, fell, sprayed, crashed, burst, exploded, and smashed into the grains of the planks and boards of Hamlin’s little shack. And all of these soaked in.

Then the long keen rays of the late spring sun would come. They would shine down against the house for several hours out of every day. They sucked. They bit. They scratched. They clawed and they chewed at the boards. And they sipped the wild saps, gums, rosins, juices, and waters out again with sunrays, winds, the dry tongue and lips of the weather that sings, then whispers, then sucks, and kisses all of the little houses until they are dry again and brittle. And this was the dryness of the heat against the house.

No place on the earth is closer to the sun than these upper fl at plains. No spot on the globe is closer to the wind that here on these north panhandle plains. Nowhere could the wind blow the rain any colder than here, nor any harder could the rain ever hope to fall, nor any longer could it stand. None of the world’s winds blow dustier nor dryer, nor harder day in and day out. Nowhere on the planet do the winds and the sun suck the grass, the leaves, the cattle, sheep, hogs, chickens, dogs, cats, people any drier. Nowhere could the winters blow any icier, the blizzards howl any lonesomer, nor the smoke from ranch house chimneys get whipped out any quicker, nowhere could the icicles hang down any longer, or could the whole world freeze in two minutes any glassier.

Just a flat place you call the upper north plains where ten blizzards and ten floods and then volcanoes had a big argument once and then hurricanes haven’t been able to settle it yet.

Just a little thin boxboard shack in the land of grazing cattle, oil fields, carbon black plants, sheep herds, chicken farms, highways as straight as a string and as deadly flat as a frontline trench. A world of flat lands mainly. Flat, crusty, hard lands mainly. Some washed-out ditches deep enough to be young canyons and some gullies and some canyons big enough to swallow several of your big towns, cliff s and mesas, gorges and hollers, drybedded rivers, sand-bottom creeks, eggless hens, running ducks, stewball nags, hypocrite kilcustards, sons of virgin, hopping hare, buffalo bear, woolly sheep, tedious toddy drinkers, open mouthers, deep thinkers, beer makers, slop inhalers, dust and dirt eaters, and sandrock sleepers. Crawlers of the night soils, diggers under the sunny sod, hole feelers, hole diggers, hole makers, and hole ticklers. Easy gravel walkers and long tale talkers. The soul, the mind, the winds, the spirit of the upper flats, the flat upper panhandles, the winds of heavens unrolling, unfolding, and the listeners down below listening in two or three low brick buildings, wheeling chuckaluck, twenty-one, stud, blackjack, muley dice, racehorse mulers, fast nag tippers, coin fl ippers, vino fermenters, and curly hair sippers. Hair of the top plains. Soils of the dead grasses. Gravel hills, gravel hollers, doggy trots, buffalo wallows. Hens, hags, satchels, bags, the boasting, the knifing, the red-hot bragging. Brushy patch nippers, manurey skippers, backhouse generals, crooked cow trailers, sheep huggers, cheap sluggers, ewes and lamb dippers, sheep sleepers, and sheepy sleepers. You. Who. The winds and the clays dusted over graves of sixteen and sixty and nine in a row, nine in a line. On hoof or on the hook. On the trail or on the sledge. On the ice or on the fire. Hands between legs and stalks of bananas, truckloads of hot ones, and truckloads of produce, cabbage, beer, turnip, celery, eggs, squashes, reeling and rocking, trucks loaded with melons, feed her watermelon so she can’t elope. Hair burned. Singed. Branded and scorched. Hide all blistered, and she’s a burned-out sister. The upper flat plains.

Tike Hamlin knew the inner sounds and all of the other outer sights of the things of the plains, his plains. Belly band. Back band. Neck yoke and collar. Buckle it up. Snap it down.

Carry it off and hang it up. Smokehouse. Woodshed. Cow stall. Manger. Henhouse. Big house. Backhouse. Cellar. Tap. Bolt. Nut and screw. Skinned knuckle. Cut finger. Burned arm. Scalded shinbone. Wheels. Hubs. Spokes. Seat. Brogans. Clodhoppers. Tit squeezers. Things of the barn and things of the pens and of the lots. Smells and the odors, sweet, sugary, syrupy, foul, rank, mean, and ornery. Hardheads. Stubborn heads. The loco cattle and bronco ponies. The penis of the stud slipping into the mare, and the sweaty hot open womb of the cow as she waited for the bull.

Ella May was of these things and born and raised among these things, and the life that she felt in her was the life that she saw and heard, felt, in all of these things in their seasons.

But the seasons of the summer things and the hot things were gone for this year, and this wind that was blowing its first hays and dusts across the farm was the very first touch of the winds of the cold season, the frostybreathed, icy-tongued breaths of old winter. And here where no valleys hid them like cowards from the sun, or from the wind either, here where they hunted for no shelter behind rocks, here where they faced all of the ten million things that men and people and the weather could throw at them, here they both knew, Tike and her, that the difference between
the summer and the blizzardy winter was sometimes, most times, just a couple of little short minutes. Th e tongue of the blizzard of winter licked under the flying tail of warm summer. One could go and the other could come in two minutes.

This was what was going on in the mind of Tike as he splashed his flour paste on the wall and pasted his papers down flat.

Ella May sat across the table from Tike and watched him eat his supper. She knew that a herd of deep thoughts were traveling through his mind. He looked down at his plate and he looked on through the plate. He looked at the dishes on the table and on through the dishes. He looked out across the room and his eyes went on through the walls. He looked out through the dark window and his eyes went all over the farm and through the panhandle. He looked across the plains. He spoke only a few words and the words seemed to go out across the country in the dark of the night. He smiled and looked into her eyes, and his eyes went in her and through her and on and on. Most of the time they talked about things at the eating table. There was a feeling of lonesomeness around the table when one of these quiet gazing spells came over Tike. Ella May felt Tike’s feelings, though, and she knew that he had just let his troubles get heavier than his lips could carry. It caused her to feel sorry and she kept quiet.

She done the supper dishes while Tike spread more pages of magazines and papers over the walls. She set her pots and pans away in their orange-crate shelves on the south wall, then fixed the dishes on the table, covered them with a linen tablecloth, and said, “In a way, I’m always pretty glad to see the cold snap come, when it comes it kills out all my old bothersome flies.”

“ ‘S right.” Tike had gotten into the motion of flattening the pages against the walls, and he seemed to be angry deep inside him, so that he worked as fast as he could to try to fight back.

“Need a good hand there, brother Tike?”

“Yeah. Use one all right.”

And together they whistled, hummed, sang parts and pieces of songs, and Ella May held the papers flat while Tike pasted them down with his broom. Together they laughed at the old pictures of sharp-toed 1910 shoes. They hugged and laughed and pointed at square-built, clumsy models of automobiles with brass trimmings, squeeze honkers, and straps and buckles. They doubled over and held their bellies as they looked at the ladies in their hats, bustles, nets, and wigs. A well-dressed man in a white Palm Beach suit and a stiff straw hat caused them to go into laughing fits. They had looked through the papers and the magazines before, because Ella May had been saving them for several years. So their laughter was caused more by the wind outside, more by the shack and the sound of the dirt blowing against the sides, more by their actual hard luck, poverty, more by the debts and the worries, than by the pictures on the pages. They both felt that all of their fears and troubles were still not as silly nor as funny as these things in the papers of twenty years ago. Yes, both of them would have explained their laughing in these words, but the truth of the matter was that this was just one of those minutes, one of those hours, when the hurt of worry had hit its white-hot heat, and had simply melted and burned into laughs. If they had seen a kite in the sky, a cat on a fence, a boot in the alley, a dog with long hair, three trees on a hill, a weed out the window blowing in the night wind, they would have laughed.

-II: Termites (pp.90-97)

Copyright © 2013 by Woody Guthrie Publications Inc. Reproduced with permission of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins.

Published in This Land, Vol. 4, Issue 5. March 1, 2013.

If you look up, you see the future; if you look down, you see the past. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Bangkok’s tallest building was a mere 12 stories high. Fast forward 20 years, and now there are hundreds of skyscrapers that grace the city’s skyline. The buildings have extravagant trimmings, elaborate designs akin to the Art Deco period of the 1920s and ‘30s. It’s like being in a New York of sorts, without the limitations of a peninsula. There are buildings shooting towards the sky all over the city, not just the downtown or central business district. New companies are popping up all over and the economy is  thriving. You see many Americans, Australians, Germans, and other Europeans here, all getting all sorts of work.

On the flip side, If you were to look down into the neighborhoods, you would see some of the same scenes from the last 50–100 years. Street vendors sell every kind of fruit and meat that you can imagine and cook traditional Thai dishes all hours of the day and for a fair price. Small alleys or sois sprawl all throughout the cities behind the towering buildings and back off of the main streets. Every neighborhood still has three or four locally owned shops, despite the country having an extremely high number of 7-Elevens. Many bars, laundry facilities, tailor shops, family-owned restaurants, and other kinds of shops line these small sois with apartments and houses on top and behind them.

My neighborhood looks kind of weird to the untrained eye at first. Many street dogs, metal buildings, and shitty speed bumps line the street, but there are some of the nicest houses and the finest selection of luxury cars coming down the soi at any given moment. Some of the sois are no wider than one car and could easily have five or six motorbike taxis passing at a time. There is always a commotion going on in the street. On one side of my apartment is a Muslim cemetery and on the other is a Buddhist cemetery. There is a mosque a couple of blocks down and you can hear prayer calls a few times a day. Another tradition they have is playing Thailand’s national anthem at eight in the morning and six in the evening. No matter what you are doing, you stop and listen while it plays through its few short verses. Then back to the hustle and bustle of Bangkok.

The mindset here is much more laid back than in most parts of the United States. They call it “Thai Time.” Nobody is in a rush, unless you’re part of the morning commute on the light rail with all of the young, talented work force occupying all of these new high rises. But inside the neighborhoods you’ll find a quiet, relaxed pace of life.

It’s another August harvest south of Bixby and Cox grins in spite of the grim reality that debilitating drought had stunted the prime time for grass growing, nearly eliminating the largest of the usual three-crop season. A recent half-inch of rain nourished the parched shoots, creating a small growth spurt, enough to warrant cutting and baling. Cox, his helper Kurtis, and wife Joyce, made hay.

Joyce drove her husband’s ’56 Ford slowly down the row of baled hay, lining up the loader that snatched each bale and raised it up to the deck of the flatbed. The crunch of the big, black tires as they rolled over the stubble of the shorn grasses created a sound like crumpling paper. The dryness of the earth produced a haze of fine dust that partially shrouded the truck and crew.

The hay making its way up the loader was Haygrazer (a Sudan and Sorghum hybrid) grass planted after the last freeze with a grain drill pulled behind the tractor, relying on gravity to feed the seed into the ground. Alfalfa is planted in the fall and harvested in May and, then depending on rainfall, is cropped up to five times. On average, alfalfa provides three cutting opportunities. Yet, the dryness of 2012 yielded only two cuttings of any kind of hay.

Quick to laugh and prone to jawboning, punctuating everything with gestures, Cox kept a near constant monologue with his longtime buddy Kurtis. They were moving hay bales like the farmers of the old days, sweating and content.

* * *

Cox was attracted to hay hauling for the girls; the boy haulers with bronze tans and Popeye arms got all the girls. He mounted his first hay truck at age 12, working with his brother, taking orders from his dad. Scared to death, he shouldered the wheel applying the farmer’s work ethic learned in his early years with a surrogate family.

In the late 1950s, there were no daycare centers in rural Oklahoma. Cox’s mom worked as a secretary for various oil companies, while his dad, Joseph Franklin Cox Jr., farmed hay. An unruly 2-year-old Cox shuffled between a host of babysitters incapable of corralling his spirit. Then he bunked at the house of his father’s friend, Otis Hullsenbeck, who kept the young boy until he was 7 years old.

On Leonard Mountain there were only woods, cows, pastures, and hillbillies like Otis. The coon dog trainer and his charge spent most of their days outside, riding horses and becoming big pals. Cox, innocent to the primitive living conditions (he took his baths in a metal wash tub), learned the backwoods life. He helped Otis and his wife pull water from a well with a rope and bucket, dug up potatoes they stored in the earth outside the front door, and helped raise coon dogs for sale. “He told me about Jesse James hiding treasures in nearby caves and treated me like a son,” Cox recalled.

Back on the family farm, the youth became a trusted hand. Under a photo of Cox from that era, his mom inscribed, “Kelly was different—always wants to be outside.” Their living conditions were relatively spartan; the temperature inside the house was the same as outside. “We didn’t have a thermostat until I was 17,” Cox said. “If I left a glass of water on the counter on a winter night, it was frozen by morning. Didn’t think anything of it.”

Cox lived with his grandparents during the week while going to school in Bixby. The creature comforts there were likewise sparse. When his Grandpa made it clear that baths were only permitted on Saturdays, Cox said, “I yelled, ‘Whoo-hooooo.’ ” Near the end of one week, he started losing hearing in an ear. The physician cleaned the dirt pile from his ear and made a diagnosis: He had a bean growing in it. Cox recalled a reporter from the Bixby paper taking a picture of him.

Grandpa Cox was his buddy. They’d rock on a front porch swing, the 10-year-old listening as his mentor extolled the virtues of telling the truth, helping friends and strangers, and other life lessons—the same ones ingrained in his father.

His father developed incurable lung cancer from a lifetime of cigarette smoking. Now a Bixby sophomore, Cox dropped baseball so he could take up the slack. He paid the pecan pickers, tended the pigs, maintained the equipment. His brother and sister pitched in where they could. When his dad passed, his daily slopping of the pigs that he enjoyed because, “I get a kick out of watching pigs eat,” became secondary to managing the family business, which included the hay crop.

With his mother’s help, 17-year-old Cox borrowed money to buy a 1959 Chevy Viking truck and a hay bale loader. He and his buddies joked that the Bixby girls took notice. “I started the business for all the wrong reasons,” said Cox, laughing, “but we’re still doing it today.”

He’s the last left working the old homestead farm his ancestors tilled before him. His parents harvested pecan trees that still wind their way through the property. They grew tomatoes, cantaloupes, and watermelons. The pigs rutted until the big trucks came and took them away. The Cox brood counted on all the fruits of the land, but hay ruled the roost.

Except for his years at Oklahoma State University, Cox has lived on and worked the same piece of dirt. He came home each summer to manage the hay crop. He always had to hire a hay helper for the summer. On a bulletin board at the OSU agriculture department, Cox posted a summer job opportunity: “Get a tan, build your muscles, see the country, get away from the rat race.” A personable, martial arts aficionado Clay Williams took the bait. The business soon required more than a summer helper.

In the late 1970s, at the height of his hay-hauling days, Cox had four trucks and up to 15 employees. He paid them three to five cents a bale, and typically they processed 800 bales a day but as many as 2,000. The hay truck was the critical employee.

He recently sold the original Chevy. Now, his go-to truck is a 1956 Ford F-600 once owned by a farmer named Earl Clayton. Cox lusted for that truck for more than a decade, but Earl would not let it go. It was parked behind Earl’s barn, full of manure and with a cracked windshield. When Earl retired, he sold it to a horse rancher.

Cox tracked the owner down 15 years ago and bought the hay truck for $750 cash and $450 worth of hay. Hauling the Ford down the two-lane highway to Leonard—knowing it had only 33,000 miles on it, but mindful that it badly needed paint, tires, brakes, and insurance—he mused that the number of hayfields may have diminished but the old hay truck had survived. But it has been assaulted.

Once, after a hot day of hauling hay, the door handle jammed. Cox moved to the passenger side and tried to kick the door open. He dented the metal door panel, entrapping the lowered window. The door did not open. Unconsciously, he reached for the handle, gave it a gentle lift, and the door swung open. Years later, he uses a vice-grip to crank open the window. The rusted grip hangs forlornly. The wipers still do not wipe. “Who needs them?” he said. “If it is raining, we’re not hauling hay anyway.”

Over the years the business dynamics of hauling hay have changed dramatically. By 1992, the round baler made it possible for a single worker to cut and bale hay into huge round bales, leaving them in the field with no need for barn storage and the requisite hay hauler. Square bales are stored in barns to prevent up to 50 percent decomposition from rain. Round bales can be left in the field due to their baling process. “Rain penetrates [a round bale] only a small way into the hay, so the loss is considerably less,” Cox explained.

The price tag of $35,000 for the round baler requires at least 1,000 acres of hay, Cox said. The round baler put an end to the days of custom hauling for ranches and large farms. Today, the old homestead is Cox’s only source of hay. No longer needing a fleet of trucks and hands, he’s back to his original staffing of one truck and one helper.

Over the years, Cox has gone through four chiropractors and five massage therapists. “Only by the grace of God,” he said, “am I still doing it.” He was born again in 1986 after reading a windshield pamphlet. He took the literature to his room in the farmhouse he shared with his mother, poring over the sinner’s prayer. Cox confessed, “God was speaking right to me.” A baptism followed and he changed his carousing and drinking ways.

With fewer and fewer people needing him to haul their hay, Cox repairs oil well pumpjacks part time. Joyce is a computer systems analyst for American Electric Power. They raise okra, watermelons, new potatoes, and tomatoes to sell during the summer at the Broken Arrow farmer’s market for extra revenue.

Cox staves off “driving into an asphalt jungle and sitting in a chair all day for my occupation,” and remains romantic about turning grasses into square bales. “Why should I stay with it?” he said with a laugh. “I doubt it’s for the money!”

Originally published in This Land, Vol. 4, Issue 5. March 1, 2013.

Be sure to check out a video on Kelly Cox from This Land.

“You Indian or something?” she says, extending her arm alongside his to compare skin tone. Hers isn’t too much darker than his.

“Dots or feathers?” he says.

” ‘Cause I am too,” she says,  ignoring the question. “Creek. Got the card and everything.” She nods affirmatively. “Grandma’s full blooded. Makes me a quarter.”

She’s as much Creek as he is, although he’s also half Cherokee. She’s becoming more attractive by the minute. The sun illuminates the turtle-shell clouds golden from underneath. He points at it and she looks, blowing smoke through her nostrils and tapping ash on the gray planking.

“What you doin’ here with all these old folks? Ain’t nothing happens here till late at night. You gotta car?”

He points. It’s smoldering blue, almost black but growing shinier as it gets darker.

“Ooh, that’s pretty,” she says. “That a Lincoln ain’t it?”

“Showl is,” he hears himself say, parroting the distressed motorist.

A red sedan rumbles around the corner, muffler growling, hesitates, then pulls into the lot. An older black couple get out, climb the short steps and go in, arms around each other, laughing. She’s tall and slim and he’s short and stocky with a grey moustache, wearing an OU ball cap.

“My name’s Jordan. Jordan Coolwater. I’m a columnist for the Trib.”

They shake. “Yolanda. Ledbetter. My friends call me YoYo. You can call me Yolanda.”

This catches him off -guard and she snorts.

“Just joking,” she says, slaps her thigh. “Shoulda seen the look on your face. You full already? Are you really an old bluesman?”

“Twenty-five and already a bluesman, yes, ma’m. How old are you?” he says.

“Old enough,” she says, flutters her eyelashes at him. “I ran track in Arkansas.”

“You look it,” he says.

“I blew out my knee and they dropped my scholarship,” she says and lifts a knee. “That’s where they cut on me.”

He grimaces and turns away from the surgical pink scar, a vertical slash along the knee. He can’t even stomach the injury replays on TV. He wants to admonish her for smoking like his uncle does to him, but they grow quiet. The locusts have shut down, too. Th en one starts up, another joins in and soon every tree around is a shaking maraca. Jordan stretches his arms above him, tiptoes, touches the roof of the porch. He guesses he did come a little early. But how was he supposed to know? He stifles a yawn. It’s the alcohol. Second-wind time.

“Can we sit in your car for a minute?” she asks.

He pops the trunk and grabs a couple beers and unlocks her side. He gets in and starts it for the AC, plugs the Zeppelin back in, punches the equalizer. Red and green dots jump along the face.

He turns it down low:

“With a purple umbrella and a  fty-cent hat
Livin’, lovin’, she’s just a woman …”

He shows her how to adjust her seat. There are about a dozen controls: seat down or up, back or front, tilt. It must have been ahead of its time in the ’70s. She plays with it a while and gets settled. They look ahead to where the sun has sank; the horizon is a vivid mauve, but fading. YoYo looks around, rubs the velvet, the fake-wood paneling. She has a smile on her face and is acting like she could get used to the car. Flips the visor to see if the lighted mirror works. It does. She checks herself out, widens her eyes, bares her bright teeth. Then she snaps it shut and, leaning toward him, reaches into her tight pocket and withdraws a joint.

“You get high?” she asks, running it back and forth underneath her nostrils. “This is some potent shit. Homegrown. But it does the trick.”

So this is why she wants to sit in the car. She is smiling at him, holding it in the air. He guns the motor to give the AC some juice. He doesn’t smoke much dope, has bought one entire quarter-ounce sack his whole life. Never failed a drug test. He might have a toke or two when he’s drunk, but, even as he tries to explain it away to himself, he knows he’s going to smoke it with her.

She lights it above a little red Bic. The twisted end flames and glows red, the smoke seeps out serpentine, a seed pops with a small flare as she sucks. Oh, what the hell, he thinks, relax and enjoy it. So he turns up the music a little, eases the seat back, and hits it every time. It’s harsh, scorches the back of his whisky-coated throat, but he nearly chokes himself holding it in as long as he can. They sit there as it grows dark, under the big oaks. He only gets out to get beer from the trunk. Now for sure he can’t take his eyes off her, she seems so fascinating. Her smooth skin, cute face with the high cheekbones. Long lashes above slanted eyes. Mysterious smirk like she knows something he doesn’t. He keeps staring at her to see what it is that makes her black besides the skin, which could be anybody’s. The hair? But it looks silky. He reminds himself she’s Indian, too. “Who was your grandma?” he asks as she takes another puff.

She holds up a finger for him to wait, her cheeks balloon, then she exhales. Smoke rolls out like clouds before a thunderstorm. Nothing wrong with her lungs, he thinks. All that track. “Maxine Tigertail. She still alive. Wildcat Junction.”

Jordan thinks about this as a swarm of sparrows wheel and swoop over the fence line in silhouette against the sunset. They stay amazingly together in formation, like an aerial stunt-show team, then zoom away.

There are many Tigertails. Some work at the tribal headquarters, and their name or picture is always in the tribal paper doing something magnanimous like cutting a ribbon with enormous scissors or holding up a giant cardboard check. The photographers usually stand 10 yards back instead of filling up the frame so all the figures are tiny, wearing their suits and ties. Ninety percent of their constituents have never donned a suit and tie.

“How’d you become Ledbetter?”

“Momma married a Ledbetter. You know there’s a ton of those.” He remembers a few Ledbetters from school. They were neighbors with some when he lived with Granny.

“I knew a CoCo Ledbetter in Muskogee,” he says.

“That would be my cousin. About my age? Yea tall?”

He nods.

“Yep, that’s her.”

They’ve smoked it to a roach. He lets down her window so she can flick it. Thankfully, she doesn’t eat it like he’d seen people do. He pounds his chest with his mouth open and more smoke leaks out. Full to the gills. He inches closer to her figuring now or never and leans in and they kiss for a minute or two. He rubs the tip of his index finger lightly along the raised welt of her scar after they break away.

“There’s a lot more where that came from,” she says.

This was going to be less complicated than he thought.

“The smoke I mean.”

They both laugh at this for an unusually long time, he thinks. Her lemon-scented perfume slices through the burnt-leaf smell.

“No, really, I don’t want any. That there should hold me. But thanks,” he says, thinking she probably wants to sell him a bag. She must think he’s rich, with the Lincoln and newspaper job.

“It’s free. Right down the road here, growing wild.”

He takes another drink, looks around. Next to the shack in back is a tumbling stack of hickory split into fire stove lengths. It hits him that this is the smokehouse where the brisket and ribs are cooked. As if on cue the owner in the white apron walks out carrying a platter of steaming meat. It seems Jordan can smell the smoked food from inside the car. Suddenly, he’s powerful hungry.

“Oh, well, thanks, Jordan,” Yolanda begins, and opens the door to get out.

The light and buzzer come on. He can’t let her get away that easy.

“Hey,” he says, getting his attitude back. “Let’s check that out if you want. I know a guy who’d probably buy some if you’re not bullshitting me.”

She puts her fine leg back in the car. “Dang, that’s a heavy-ass door,” she says, shutting it.

He passes the bottle. She takes a swig without delay. Yep, she’s got a little Indian in her. She grimaces and waves her hand back and forth in front of her mouth. He figures there’s a mountain of time before 2 in the morning, which is the action he wants to see. Right now there’s four cars in the lot and no live music, just a few brisket eaters and beer drinkers. He’s taken a liking to YoYo, so it wouldn’t hurt to drive around a little with her, show off the Lincoln.

She’s got the mirror down again, patting her hair, smacking her lips.

“You look good,” he says. “Smell good, too. Don’t worry.”

“Thank you,” she says, shuts the visor. Good manners, he thinks.

“Where’s this place at? I ain’t gonna get shot am I?”

“Hell naw. You think I’d take you to a place like that? It’s just up here along the creek. I found it one day fishing with my brother. He pulled some up and dried it out in the oven.”

YoYo says, “Clear,” and gravel crunches when they pull onto the road. She fiddles with the seat some more, getting comfy. There’s still plenty of light, unlike in winter when after sundown it’s pitch black within minutes. He turns down the music and hears the locusts buzzing, crickets chirping and tree frogs burping. The pot plays tricks on him. It seems he is flying but when he looks at the speedometer the orange-tipped needle is at 10. His face feels flushed and by that feeling knows his eyes are red. He stops the car and looks in the mirror, but can’t tell. He leans over and sticks his face in YoYo’s.

“Are my eyes shot?”

She looks him in the eye, bobs her head like a boxer to get another view.

“They ain’t crystal clear, put it that way. It don’t matter, who cares?”

She rubs his leg up and down. He feels the stirrings of a hard-on, turns the tunes back up, drives on. He smells dope on his fingers every time he puffs on his cigarette, blowing smoke out the side of his mouth opposite YoYo. It’s cool this evening, a much-appreciated respite from the steaming day. Even at night it’s usually hot and sticky. Growing up in the Creek Indian housing projects, they were officially the last ones to cave in and buy an air-conditioner. They were also the last to get cable and a telephone. Carpet was a pipe dream. The little window unit only cooled the kitchen and living room and that was after hanging a blanket to cut off the hall and back bedrooms.

He begins to wonder how much dope YoYo smokes. She doesn’t look like a typical stoner.

“Do you smoke a lot?” he asks her. She holds up the cigarette and arches her eyebrows. He shakes his head.

“More than I should, probably,” she says. “I never smoked when I ran. But this shit’s free. You try living out here, stuck in the country, nothin’ to do.”

He thinks if they got together maybe he could wean her off it. But damned if she doesn’t reach down and pull out another.

They enter the thick shade canopy that leads to the creek. Th ey say Oklahoma’s No. 1 cash crop is marijuana. Th ere was a story about it in the Tulsa paper. When he was a kid they saw a big patch
by the side of the road. Grandpa said, “Looky there,” and pulled over. He said it was from people throwing “wacky tobaccky” out the window with seeds in them. It was ironic because when Grandpa rolled his Velvet, folks always thought he was twisting a joint. A pickup full of teenagers pointed and laughed outside a QuikTrip once while Grandpa, oblivious, arms braced on the steering wheel, filled an OCB paper and rolled it, slowly licked it back and forth.

They cross the low-water dam, water gushing arcs on both sides. YoYo has her arm hanging out the window and gets some on it.

“Go on up a little ways and stop off to the side,” she says.

They stand at the trunk and take another whisky shot apiece.

“It’s dark in there,” he says. “I don’t have a flashlight.”

“Simple,” she says and sparks her lighter, holds it like a torch. The flame wobbles across her face.

They jump across the ditch and wade through Johnson grass. He’s right behind her, wondering what the heck he is doing walking into the woods with a strange black girl (Indian, too, he reminds himself), stoned drunk, hunting a marijuana stand. She reaches for his hand as they duck under a limb, and instantly they’re cloaked in darkness.

She holds aloft the lighter, looks around. “C’moan,” she says.

With every step they crunch twigs, snap branches. Th e going is fairly easy, though; in fact it’s a relief to get out of the open into some secrecy. She heads straight for a while, then veers east, toward the creek. A barn owl hoots eight notes from across the road: “What’s up with you, what’s up with youuuu?” Locusts have quit, but crickets pick up the chorus. It smells damp and like hay.

“Do you ride horses?” she asks. He can only see her heart-shaped rump in front of him.

“Hardly ever. They take off and won’t mind when I try to get them to stop.” She laughs.

“They know you’re scared. We got three of them: Blaze, Smoky, and Peaches. I ride Smoky every day. Over to the club sometimes.” He envisions a horse tethered to the porch, like something out of Gunsmoke. He laughs.

“Damn, you are country, aren’t you? Where do you keep them?”

“We got 32 acres. Let’s take a break,” she says. They hug and kiss, he feels her stiff tongue in his mouth. It tastes like Seagram’s. He rubs up and down her back, squeezes her bottom, traces an eyebrow with a thumb. She doesn’t resist. She lights another joint.

“How much farther?” he croaks, cheeks full of air, smoke oozing from mouth and nose.

“Right up ahead. Got to be quiet, though.”

They start off again. He hears a buzzing he realizes is coming from inside his head. He laughs out loud, stops, and takes a drink.

“Shhhh,” she says.

He catches up to her. She has the lighter going again.

“We’re here. There it is,” she whispers, pointing.

“Why are we whispering?”

“Shhhh!” she answers, irritated.

It stands out even in the dark: a circular patch in a clearing obscured from above by foliage. She walks to the edge and squats next to a plant, pulls it with both hands. She has to tug a few times, then he hears roots tear. It comes out and she bangs it on the ground to break off clots of dirt, roots dangling like white worms. She raises it to her face and inhales.

“My brother call this here Stilwell Spider Tops,” she whispers, hands it to him.

There is the unmistakable skunky smell, the leaves bend and hang down like bouncing tarantula legs. It’s much heavier than it looks, he thinks, stroking it through his hands, sniffing it. She’s bent over pulling plants as fast as she can, grunting, throwing them to the side. He strolls through the head-high growth, yanks one up. He breaks off a stalk and gets a fragrant, sticky substance on his hands. She tells him he’s supposed to pull it out at the base.

“Like this,” she says, rips up another.

She wastes no time, going stalk to stalk, uprooting plants until she’s got about two dozen in a heap. She’s breathing heavy. He whips his back and forth, making zipping sounds.

“OK,” he says, “fuck it. Let’s get out of here.”

“A couple more,” she says, then collects her booty.

“What you going to do with those?” he asks.

“Take them home,” she says, which he gathers involves his vehicle, but by this time he doesn’t care, just wants out. “I’m coming back after all these motherfuckers tomorrow, watch,” she says. The dope is making him paranoid. He pictures electric fences, poles with tips sharpened into picks, jungle traps that sling you upside down, potheads with pistols. He hears splashing and thinks someone is coming after them, but it’s only the rushing creek. A bullfrog croaks. They tramp back the way they came and she lays the plants in longways behind the ice chest. He gets a beer out of the cooler. The ice has turned to mainly water, but it’s still cold, so he empties the other case into it so he’ll have something to carry into the club at 2.

Originally published in This Land, Vol. 4 Issue 5. March 1, 2013.