railroad depot. Its Masonic temple was the tallest building around for some time. Visiting a few years earlier, Booker T. Washington had praised Boley as the “most enterprising, and in many ways the most interesting of the Negro towns in the United States.”
Now the population hovers around a thousand. The main employers, I was told, are a nearby prison and the Smokaroma, on Bar-Bq Avenue. The town’s biggest event, the “oldest existing rodeo in an African American community.”
Everyone I met in Boley was warm and welcoming. Still I felt an unbridgeable distance. These people know. They were born here; they’ve lived here all their lives. They know their past. They know home. The names of the Creek freed people who founded the town didn’t include names I knew.
A century and more ago it was Come to Boley! Come to Cimarron City! Come to Liberty! Did ancestors come? I imagined some of my mother’s forebears relocating from Alabama’s water-thick air, plantation fields, and dark woods. I imagined their response to expanses of grass and sky, to the opening of distance to the eye, to a land on which they hoped to live on their own terms. I imagined the difference in felt attachment to place that one generation could make—one born in the antebellum South, another on the plains.
Had they wagoned in on a day like that of my visit, the sky an open vault, the air scented by the previous night’s rain and a thick June greening, they must have imagined possibility and then begun to live it. I’d like to say the old homestead lay upstream, that they called it haven, that maybe they raised broodmares and grew the best greens for miles. I’d like to believe imagination could be sparked by familial memory.
Or did any arrive in bondage decades earlier as slavery and enslaved were brought westward on trails of tears? Were any of them “Buffalo Soldiers” posted at Fort Sill or Fort Reno? Companies from the army’s then all-Black regiments served a century and more ago in Indian Territory.
I imagined but did not know.
Boley elders suggested looking for family names in the Dawes allotment rolls of the five nations. So east I drove to Okmulgee, capital of the Muskogee (Creek) Nation, by the Deep Fork of the Canadian River. The library and archives had lists segregating “by blood” tribal members from freedmen and freedwomen for all five nations. Although no Cades appeared on the rolls I saw, there were Turners, Reeves, and Allens. But were any of them my Turners, Reeves, or Allens? Without more than surnames, it was impossible to learn if any rolls listed my mother’s ancestors, by blood or not.
What I did learn was that the Cherokee Nation had revoked tribal citizenship of descendants of its freedmen and women. A knoll overlooking Tahlequah, capital of the nation, still goes by the name “Nigger Hill.”
• • •
Before leaving Oklahoma I returned to flowing water, crossing the Cimarron River—its ripples aglint and aglitter in slant waning light. Cimarron—wild, untamed—is a good name. Centuries earlier los cimarrónes had escaped Spanish slavery to live in seclusion on the isthmus of Central America.
Wading into the river’s insistent flow I could almost believe the impulse of life. At a confluence these waters merged with another channel’s flow, their sand and mud loads merging, too. Many rivers become one in Oklahoma, but not human beings or blood streams.
Bridging the distance between history and the particularities of family seemed an impossible task given the erosive and estranging power displacement could wield. Circumstances leaving no trace could outweigh any longing to remain in a homeplace. Any continuity forged by knowing one’s lineages of kinship could break and break.
The river surface blushed in the last crimson light of day. Perhaps, I thought, wounds also flow in the blood. As if rending could begin in one’s veins and arteries, leaving partial access but never the whole. Self-knowledge reworked over generations becoming piecework.
But piecework needn’t mean empty. Fragmented needn’t mean all gone. Ankle-deep in the Cimarron, I needed to believe this.
*
SILENCE CAN BE a sanctuary or frame for stories told. Silence also obscures origins. My parents’ muteness once seemed tacit consent that generational history was no longer part of life or living memory. That a past survived was best left unexposed or even forgotten as self-defense. But unvoiced lives cut a sharp-felt absence. Neither school lessons nor images surging around me could offer salve or substitute. My greatest fear as a young girl was that I wasn’t meant to exist.
Yet one idea stood firm: The American land preceded hate. My child-sense of its antiquity became as much a refuge as any place, whether the Devil’s Punchbowl or a canyon called Grand. Still, silences embedded in a family, and in a society, couldn’t be replaced even by sounds so reliable: of water spilling down rock, of a thunderstorm rolling into far distance, or of branches sifting wind.
By the end of the nineteenth century some of my mother’s people had left rural Alabama and Virginia behind for the capital of Pennsylvania. How or if Oklahoma entered, or what existed before plantations, I don’t yet know. Scattered elements of language, like Momma’s Pennsylvania thee, touch me. Dad’s forebears took different paths, known and unknown, through the Chesapeake tidewater and Piedmont. Choices both parents made cast long shadows over me. The unvoiced history of this continent calls, too. It may ground all.
An immense land lies about us. Nations migrate within us. The past looms close, as immediate as breath, blood, and scars on a wrist. It, too, lies hidden, obscured, shattered. What I can know of ancestors’ lives or of this land can’t be retrieved like old postcards stored in a desk drawer. To re-member is to know that traces now without name, like the “unidentified” subjects in O. E. Aultman’s photographs, still mark a very real presence. To re-member is to discover patterns in fragments. As an Earth historian I once sought the relics of deep time. To be an honest woman, I must trace other residues of hardness.
Far from any real town, my house sits at the edge of a field cleared two centuries ago, bordered by relict stone walls and wooded, worn-down hills. So different from the Devil’s Punchbowl or Cimarron plains, this landscape is yet kin and reminder. I like to walk through hemlock, white pine, and hardwood cover to the top of Long Hill, the ancient rocky mass behind my home. It’s on rain-soaking walks especially, when drops strike exposed schist, that tracing hardness seems most necessary.
ALIEN LAND ETHIC: THE DISTANCE BETWEEN
When I was a horse, a wild Appaloosa full of speed, I’d run up and down sidewalks, around playgrounds and our yard—just to feel wind rush with me. But once the world moved beyond sense, I began to run from what I feared. Riots near our new home in Washington, D.C., left burnt, gutted remains of buildings I knew. The “war” in Vietnam joined us at dinner each night as TV footage of wounded soldiers, of crying women and children, of places with names like Khe Sanh, My Lai. Assassinations of men my parents called “good men” meant anyone—my parents, my friends, or I—could disappear at any time. Even the familiar Good night, Chet. Good night, David, and good night for NBC News no longer comforted.
I learned by the age of eight that hate could be spit wetting the front of my favorite, mom-made dress. Hate could be a classmate’s sing-song “never saw nothin’ as ugly as a nigger, never saw nothin’ as crummy as a nigger.” His eyes on me.
I ran not just to feel wind, but in hope it would blow away whatever it was about me that was bad and hate-deserving. Safety lived in my room, in my mother’s arms, and outdoors on a land that never judged or spat.
