Kim mentions Wofford the medicine man to Carol Medlam; Carol has heard nothing of Wofford but suggests a “Cotton” Blagg who runs a package store across the line in Oklahoma. Kim makes her first trip into Oklahoma.
The Mile Away gets its name from the fact that it is exactly one mile away from Cherokee City, westward, its eastern wall practically right on the Arkansas state line. Benton County, Arkansas, voted dry in 1945 and has revoted dry ever since, meaning that not even beer can legally be sold in the county. All Oklahoma counties are wet, but the hard stuff can be sold only in incorporated towns of three hundred or more, and The Mile Away carries only beer. It is operated by Cotton Blagg’s son. Cotton lives down the highway a little ways. A man of fifty-five with sparse light-blond hair—hence his nickname—he has lived in this area all of his life. In fact, he was raised on Hog Eye Creek, not far from where the Indians used to buy their moonshine from the whites. In a curious kind of reversal (“Wofford’s Revenge”?), the Indian of old traveled from the dry Nation into wet Arkansas to buy booze; now the white man in dry Benton County, Arkansas, has to cross the state line to get a six-pack of Coors. But Cotton estimates that less than 10 percent of the business of The Mile Away is from Indians, whose drinking habits aren’t really different, nowadays, from the white man’s. “Most of your Indians over back this way,” says Cotton Blagg, “you didn’t have no trouble with. You take one occasionally—you know, they’re just like everbody else, they’d get greased up a little bit, or try to, but, I mean, we didn’t have no problems, ’cause they had to get off the premises; we sold ’em beer and just told ’em to get off and go somewheres else. They couldn’t talk real good, a lot of ’em, but we never had no trouble with ’em.”
“You must have gone to school with Indian kids,” Kim says.
“Yes,” Cotton says, “I did. Went to school with Indian children every day. They’re easy to get along with. But you just kind of have to watch it: if you run into them and do ’em a favor or two, then they’ll want you to do ’em some more favors.”
“Did you ever know an Indian named Wofford?” Kim asks.
“Yeah, they used to be a lot of Woffords around here, and there’s still some.”
But Cotton Blagg has never heard of a medicine man called Wofford. He tells Kim that she ought to talk to an old Indian woman named Kate Scraper, and he gives directions on how to find Kate Scraper off in the scrub oaks of eastern Delaware County. The roads are not paved, and Kim’s car, Zephyra, fears the ruts and potholes, but Kim maneuvers her way to an old crossroads, still not far west of Cherokee City, still in Oklahoma, where there is a three-room “shotgun” house, painted gray, inhabited by a very old but spry half-Cherokee squaw and a large white house-cat. The interior is too plain and simple, too poor, to be compote, but it is meticulously neat and clean. Kim is fascinated by Kate Scraper, the first Indian she has ever talked with, and the first nonagenarian. Among half-breeds, Kate Scraper, age ninety-two, is that rarity whose father was a full-blood Cherokee and whose mother was a white woman, rather than the customary other-way-around. Arthritis has left Kate’s hands extremely gnarled, but her face, although deeply lined, is still very bright and attractive, and her snow-white hair is well kept and neat. She was a child during the heyday of Cherokee City and the only living person who can remember not only the buildings—three general stores, two churches, livery barns, two hardware stores, the Odd Fellows Hall, Doc Norris’s drugstore, the school, three hotels, and a café—but also a skating rink. Kate was fourteen (in 1907) before her parents would permit her (any day but Saturday) to go into downtown Cherokee City to roller-skate at the rink.
In her joyful, musical voice, free from the crackling that Kim has heard in the voices of other old women she has interviewed, Kate Scraper tells of the small but honest pleasures of growing up in Cherry-kee City. She wasn’t born until the year after Harve Norris killed himself, but she can remember the story of it, if not the name of the girl involved. Her Cherokee grandfather fought in the Civil War with General Albert Pike’s Indian Rebels at the Battle of Pea Ridge, which is in Benton County, not far from Cherokee City. Pea Ridge (or the Battle of Elkhorn Tavern, as it is sometimes called) has long been considered the most crucial Civil War engagement west of the Mississippi, responsible for the Confederates’ loss of the trans-Mississippi and possibly the entire war, primarily because Pike’s regiments of Indians proved to be totally ineffectual in the white man’s style of warfare.
Kim asks, “Was your family thought of more as white or Indian?”
And Kate answers, “It didn’t make any difference.”
Kim asks, “Did you think of yourself more as Indian or white?”
And Kate replies, “Well, I don’t know if I did! No, there was lots of Indians here, and lots of white people.” In Cherokee City’s population of five hundred, she points out, there were many Indians and mixed-breeds, and there was a lot of mingling, particularly at the church, the most important social institution in the wild, mean, woolly community.
“Did you ever hear of an Indian named Wofford?” Kim asks.
“Which one?” Kate replies. “The county is made up of Woffords. There’s Charlie, and Bob, and Jim….”
Kim thinks of Marie Wofford’s mention of a James D. Wofford, and says, “There’s a Jim Wofford?”
“There were two Jim Woffords, father and son,” Kate explains. “The father lived to be over a hundred years old.”
Kim would like to tell her about the two Peter Mankinses, or discuss the two John Milton Norrises, but there is no time. “Which was the medicine man?” she asks.
“Both of them were ‘medicine men,’” Kate says. “They used wild stuff, wild roots and such. People came from far and near to be cured by them. White and red, but mostly red. Young Jim died, oh, ten or twelve years ago, although his widow is still living not far from here. Both Jims were fortunetellers, and both of them could tell you where to find something you’d lost.”
Both of them could tell me where to find something I’ve lost, Kim is thinking, but both of them are dead. “Is that how they made their living?” she asks. “Curing people with roots and telling people how to find what they’d lost?”
“Nobody ever earned a living doing that,” Kate Scraper says. “The Woffords had to farm, like all the rest of us.”
Although Kate lived in The Nation (which became Oklahoma when she was eleven), she and her family attended the Baptist church in Cherokee City. The building still stands, whitewashed and neat, on the paved highway just north of the Cherokee Kid quick stop. It was built over a hundred years ago by Hamp Woolridge, who was a Baptist deacon despite being the town’s leading distiller (link to Peter Mankins, Sr.). Architecturally it is an archetype: small, white, the porticoed entrance in the gable end, like a little temple. This is in contrast to the Sulphur City Baptist Church of the last chapter, but almost identical to Marble City’s “Basin” church/schoolhouse of the following chapter. The belfries of the Cherokee City and Marble City churches are identical, with louvered sides; both contain bells, real cast-iron bells that ring, the latter echoing against the walls of the valley, the former pealing and rolling out across the plains. The only essential difference between the Cherokee City and Marble City churches is that the former is a little bit longer, four bays or four side windows as against the latter’s three, reflecting a larger population.
Kate Scraper shows Kim a clipping, kept in her Bible, from a church newsletter, circa 1968, of the Cherokee City Baptist Church: “We have some Cherokee Indians who come to our services. They are nice and friendly, so we know all Indians aren’t as bad as we see on television.” Kate does not comment. Nor does she smile; that is, she does not smile any more than usual, for she is usually smiling.
Kim asks, “Do you remember, back in the old days, any stories of Indians’ being mistreated?”
“No,” Kate answers, “no, I don’t.”
A standard question put to the very old: to what do you attribute your lo
ngevity? Centenarian Peter Mankins, Sr., had cited, to the Gazette editor who asked it of him, the regularity of his habits of chewing tobacco every day for sixty years, and drinking a whiskey tonic every morning (and perhaps getting his feet washed as a Primitive Baptist). Kate Scraper’s secret for a long life is simply that she has never worried about anything, never had a moment of anxiety or feared anything. There have been no tenterhooks in her house. Grief and sorrow, yes, trouble and hurt and poverty, certainly, but never any dread. To Kim, who is destined during this journey among lost cities to hear many “senior citizens” reveal their ways of having attained seniority, to learn what prescriptions have ensured the survival of the survivors, this comes as a revelation—especially because Kim has often accused herself of excessive worry, and because tension is her constant companion.
Kim wants to ask Kate Scraper how one can forestall care or banish worry, but she is afraid that the old woman might give some answers too easily had, such as: read your Bible, or chew peyote, or chant to the dawn. Instead Kim asks, “Do you ever wish Cherokee City had really become a city?”
“Oh, yes!” Kate exclaims, her eyes sparkling with double images: the remembered village of her youth, the possibility of a great place that would never be.
“What do you miss most?” Kim asks.
“Oh, my church. That’s what I miss the most, going to church. I loved my church. I was sorry when they had to give it up.”
The few Missionary Baptists remaining in Cherokee City in the late 1960s decided to abandon their small white temple, or, rather, to lease it out. There are three church houses still standing in Cherokee City, the other two almost unrecognizable as such, except for their shape: the gable end is the front. One, a whitewashed but rusting tin-coated edifice at the end of Main Street, is almost too tiny to hold a congregation, but was once the Pentecostal Holiness Church; the other, scarcely larger, out on the gravel road leading to the lost cemetery where “Jeremiah Woolly” is buried, is a grayish-green prefabricated metal building that once held the Assembly of God Church. Once there were many churches in Cherokee City; there is no irony in the fact that such a wild and mean town needed to sober up on Sunday mornings and atone for its badness through worship. According to the recent History of Benton County by J. Dickson Black, there were once Baptist, Methodist, Episcopal, Christian, and Congregational churches in Cherokee City. In modern times there was also a Church of Christ. The few remaining Missionary Baptists now go to Gentry for their religion as well as for their groceries. The sign in front of the old Baptist church says “Church of God in Christ,” which is a branch of Mennonites, of which the Amish are a sect. Kim remembers Amish in their buggies and black clothes in the vicinity of Beebe, Arkansas, but she has seen none of them around Cherokee City. She has heard of factions among the other denominations; the Cherokee City citizens did not confine their fighting to Saturdays but carried it over to their religious differences on Sunday. Don Dickson remembers that when the congregation in the Baptist church would sing “Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown?” the Methodists would chime in with a loud rendition of “No, Not One!” The Pentecostal Holiness Church—or “Holy Rollers,” as they were called by others because they literally rolled on the floor or the ground when the Spirit overpowered them—were subjected to harassment that culminated in the dynamiting of their church. A milder form of harassment was simply to throw a live skunk through the door of the church and into the midst of the worshippers on Sunday morning.
Using Carol Medlam as her information center, Kim learns the name of the Mennonite minister, John Wiens. He lives in Gentry, but is too busy for an interview; he agrees to answer any of Kim’s questions by mail. She makes up a questionnaire for him, which he takes weeks to fill out and send back to her. His full name is John Wiens, and he was born on September 1, 1920; before coming to Cherokee City he was with the Winton Mennonite Congregation in Winton, California. The Central District Mission of the Church of God in Christ, Mennonite, headquarters in Moundridge, Kansas, sent him to Cherokee City to take over the vacant Baptist church building, leasing it with an option to buy, paying rent by making the insurance payments. He does not know what happened to the former Baptist occupants.
He has not heard of the harassment and dynamiting of the Pentecostal Holiness congregation. He is not aware of the two other abandoned church buildings of Cherokee City, and does not know anything about their histories. His small congregation, which consists of six members and eight nonmembers, none of them natives of Cherokee City, has met with no hostility from the residents of Cherokee City.
Kim’s last question: Are you and the members of your congregation familiar with, or interested in, the history of Cherokee City? Reverend Wiens’s answer: “We are not familiar with the history of Cherokee City and have no particular interest.”
Kim asks Dovey and Elton Yates, “Do you know anything about the Mennonites?” Dovey says, “I don’t know a thing about ’em,” but Elton says, “They’s a family of Mennonites lives out east of Cherokee City, name of Zitzman or Zissman. You should talk to Joe; he used to work for ’em.”
Joe who? Kim asks. Dovey says, “Our son the senator!” She gives Kim a fan, of the simple cardboard-on-a-stick type that ladies used to fan themselves with in rural churches and on porches on hot summer days. On one side of this fan are printed three photographs: a toddler climbing a washtub with an early wringer attached, above the caption “Candidate First Testing the Waters”; a formal portrait, circa 1900, of Rob and Laura Yates, the former looking like a very young version of Elton; and an old photograph of the Cherokee City Livery Barn, white false front, with all the Yates men standing before it, J. Yates, prop. On the other side of the fan is a red-white-and-blue message in support of “Joe Yates for Senator.”
“I never give a speech or have anyone introduce me but what I point out the fact that I am from Cherokee City,” Senator Joe Yates tells Kim when she visits his home in Bentonville, the county seat. Newly elected to represent the First District of Northwest Arkansas in the State Senate, Elton and Dovey’s oldest son is proud of his hometown and his Yates heritage. A consummate politician, he knows practically everyone in his district. His master’s thesis in geography at the University of Arkansas, entitled “Land Utilization of Cherokee Township,” required him to interview all of the farmers around Cherokee City. For several years before running for the Senate he was a tax assessor and tax collector, a good way to get to know people. For a few years he also indulged in an ambition to own and operate a plant nursery in his hometown, called Cherokee Gardens, with his mother and father working in it.
Senator Yates tells Kim what little he knows about the Mennonites: they moved into and around Cherokee City twenty-five or thirty years ago and have kept a low profile ever since. As a young man, Joe Yates once cut hay for Mr. Zissman and noticed that the several young daughters wore long black dresses with black socks and hats, but otherwise the Mennonites were hardly conspicuous. “They’re very nice people, make excellent neighbors, and they’ve never really expanded in size.”
People are more tolerant nowadays. When Kim informs Senator Yates that the Reverend Wiens had never heard of the harassment and dynamiting of the Holy Rollers, the senator says, “That dynamitin occurred when my daddy was just a kid…. But when I was a kid they used to have a lot of brush arbors around…. They’d have revivals. They were very loud; you could hear ’em, oh, a half-mile away. Makin a racket. Probably the church got blown up from resentment. Makin noise. People were not real tolerant years ago.”
Senator Yates was born in the house of his grandfather Rob, which had been the Cherokee House hotel. Elton and Dovey never forbade him to go into downtown Cherokee City, and he can remember from earliest childhood how mean the town was. “People were just ornery. I’ve seen a few knife fights, that kind of thing, and there was just a lot of fightin goin on. There were a number of people in Cherokee City who did not hesitate to shoot you, or cut you up, or beat you to death.”
> In preparation for interviewing the senator, Kim has found and read his thesis in the university library. The main conclusion of “Land Utilization of Cherokee Township” is that the use of the land at that time (1970) was the best possible type for that particular land. Variations of this theme are recurrent in the text: “The land use of the township is what one would expect to find in any area of similar topography in Northwest Arkansas” and “The author believes that the current uses of land in Cherokee Township represent the most practical and economic uses at this time” and “In the opinion of the author, the present land uses represent the best possible types according to the capability of the land.”
Kim asks, “Do you still feel that the land is being put to the best possible use?”
“There’s been a tendency since I wrote that thesis,” the senator answers, “that more people have gone to the city to work, and the farm has become more the hobby, a place to supplement their income by a few cattle, something like that. The poultry industry has tended to maximize itself….” During the sixties and seventies, Tyson’s, a giant of the poultry industry, headquartered in Benton County, subsidized the growing of chickens all over northwestern Arkansas, until the entire landscape was covered with long metal sheds for the hatching and raising and breeding of chickens. In Cherokee City as elsewhere, this chicken boom “has tended to maximize itself,” a polite way of saying that many farmers found themselves stuck with acres of chicken sheds but had no profitable market for their flocks. All around Cherokee City there has been an almost total turnover in ownership of the land.
The apple orchards are gone. Early in this century, all of the land to the north of the village was in apples, four thousand acres of orchards, and these apples took all of the prizes at the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. But the cycle of insects and pesticides and the development of pesticide-resistant insects, and the natural aging and dying of the trees, gradually killed the apple industry. “No one was willin to plant ’em back,” says Joe Yates, “but while they lasted, heck, all those guys who had orchards made good money.”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 102