by Anita Hill
Two years after the stabbing, unmarried and living alone at age thirty, Hale brought a twelve-year-old black child into his household. The boy, known as Goody, was being raised by a widow in the community, and Hale promised the mother of eight that he would provide Goody with a home and send him to school. Goody lived in Ernest’s home until adulthood, then moved into a home of his own on the Hale property. Hale kept his promise, even after he married and had children of his own, staying in contact even after Goody left Arkansas.
We can only wonder why Ernest Hale chose to defy social custom and take a black child into his home. One theory is that it had to do with Lillian, a mulatto girl who grew up in Hale’s boyhood home. Lillian was Ernest’s half sister, the daughter of his father and the Hale family’s cook. Ernest, twelve years older than Lillian, broke another taboo when he developed a friendly relationship with her that lasted long into adulthood, often visiting her openly in her home.
Ernest Hale’s affection for Lillian and Goody may explain why he became known as a “friend to blacks in Little River County.” Another possible explanation is that it was guilt or remorse over McClain’s lynching. Within days of Dock McClain’s arrest, Hale’s brother Archie shot a black man; Archie, who was ten years younger than Ernest and living in their father’s home, claimed the man had threatened him with a knife. From then on, Ernest’s relationship with his younger brother was strained. The two feuded—occasionally with guns in hand, threatening to shoot each other—until Archie’s death in 1957. Ernest died a year later. His son and grandchildren still live in Little River County on the land that Ernest amassed.
Hale’s grandsons offered me a much more simplistic recollection of the McClain incident than Mary McClain’s grandchildren might have. The Hales were told by family members over the years that Ernest was near death for days after the stabbing and that the person who assaulted him “was hanged.” The McClain lynching is nonetheless part of their family legend and may have influenced Ernest Hale’s decision to make a black child a member of his household. It also may have influenced the racial attitudes of his grandsons, who want people to “know the truth” about what happened in 1910. I am flattered that the Hales entrust me with telling the truth about their grandfather. I too want to know the truth. Their truth may be simply that he was stabbed and almost died and that the culprit was hanged. Neither I nor they believe that Ernest Hale conspired to have Dock McClain lynched.
Through my cousin Faye, I have an account of Hale’s life that is not entirely different from the grandsons’. She expresses little doubt that McClain stabbed Hale. And she, like Hale’s descendants, did not know of the lynching. “Our parents tried to keep those kind of things away from us,” Faye said, referring to herself and her siblings.
My cousin’s and the Hales’ stories don’t supply any information about what provoked Dock McClain. Frankly, I don’t know how to define provocation in the context of the virulent racism in existence at the time. No matter the circumstances of the assault on Hale, McClain’s lynching was an act of lawless barbarism.
But I want to know something different about Ernest Hale. I want to know how the pieces of Ernest Hale’s life came together to lead to his apparent rejection of his brother’s act of vengeance. I suspect that when Hale, as a boy, lived in an unheated barn rather than his father’s comfortable home, he learned what life as an outcast was like. Through that experience, he might have had some idea of what life was like for Dock McClain and his family. I suspect that at the very least, when Ernest Hale saw Goody, he was reminded of himself as a boy. When Hale saw the child he would take into his home, he might have imagined Goody growing up ignorant and subject to the whims of racial hostility then so prevalent in the South and done what he could to prevent it.
The truth I want to know about Hale is whether his very real kinship with Lillian—his time in her home—allowed him to see himself in people of other races. Lillian is not a part of the story the grandsons know. Indeed, I learned of Lillian through Faye, and they learned of Lillian through me. With so many parts, from different sources, a whole truth is likely unknowable. But what we do know is that Ernest Hale defied convention and found a new way of living in community with his black neighbors in Little River County. And perhaps that is as much of Hale’s truth as one need know. My grandparents’ reality was different.
A Better Place
In 1914, four years after an angry mob killed Dock McClain, my grandfather, Henry Elliott, had his own brush with a near lynching. Following a dispute with one of his white neighbors, Henry was warned about a possible plot to kill him. Ida and Henry had reason to take the threat seriously, and certainly no reason to believe that local law enforcement would intercede on his behalf. Fearing for his life and for his family’s sense of security, Henry temporarily left my grandmother Ida and their seven children in search of a better place to raise his family.
Ida lived with the memory of her brother Danny’s murder after a fight with a white man. When Henry was threatened, Ida’s oldest son, Arthur, was nineteen years old—close to the same age Danny was when he was killed. The fact that Arthur was entering manhood made him vulnerable enough; his quick temper put him at even greater risk. Yet he was not the only vulnerable member of the Elliott household. At fifty, Henry’s age and status in the community were not enough to protect him. Henry was ambitious and industrious in his efforts to provide for his family. He was a founding member of the New Hope Baptist Church and did business with the whites in the community. Ida knew that despite his years of respectable living, Henry would have been as helpless as Joseph Young’s father had been in trying to dissuade a mob intent on harming a member his family. At the time, Henry and Ida were also raising four other sons, all under the age of ten, and two daughters, ages sixteen and fourteen. Ida, who had seen two of her daughters die of tuberculosis, worried constantly about losing her husband or a son to lynching. Had Henry’s fate been the same as Dock’s, Ida would have had to face life as the provider for her family at the age of forty-one. She would have been left alone to protect her children from poverty and persecution.
After leaving Little River County for a few weeks to avoid a lynching, Henry returned and relocated the family to a new and, he hoped, safer home. Henry and Ida and seven of their children followed in the footsteps of earlier migrants and made their way west to Oklahoma. They left behind their house, Henry’s and Ida’s parents, and four of their children. Those who stayed witnessed the last recorded lynching in Little River County, in 1917.
Family members tell two different stories about Henry and Ida’s decision to leave Little River County and about the 1914 threat of lynching. With some coaxing, my uncle George Elliott told me that the family left after a white neighbor tried to force Ida to cook and clean for his wife. On Ida’s behalf, Henry declined this “offer” of employment. The white neighbor responded to the “racial insult” with intimidation, saying Henry and his family would be visited by the night riders, the lynch mobs. My cousin, Faye, who was raised in Little River County, recalled a more ominous scene involving hooded white men and a direct threat. Denying an accusation that he was harboring a black fugitive, Henry ordered the white vigilantes off his property. Henry had been tipped off to his neighbors’ plot to kill him for “sassing white men.” One of his friendlier white neighbors had issued a rather direct warning: “Leave or you will be lynched.” Whatever the precise details, in an era when racism was continually escalating into violence, the Elliotts had been persuaded to uproot their family, seeking safety and a better life in Oklahoma.
Economics probably played a role in their decision as well. In order to acquire the seeds and supplies he needed each year for farming his land in Arkansas, Henry signed crude documents that gave his lenders control over what he could obtain and the value of items he received. An 1897 entry found in the Little River County Mortgage Record reads:
I, W. H. Elliott . . . in considerati
on of the sum of fifty dollars, to me in hand paid by W. P. Goolsby . . . and for the consideration of such supplies of provision, merchandise, money, etc., as the said W. P. Goolsby supplies . . . hereby grant, bargain, and sell to said W. P. Goolsby the following described property . . . Six acres of cotton that I may raise in my farm . . . One Bay mare, five years old. . . . Conditioned that should I pay to him on or before 1st November 1897 (with 10% from date) such sums that I may be due to the aforesaid W. P. Goolsby.10
By the time the Elliotts left Little River County, they were no longer living on the land they had homesteaded. Henry and Ida were farming for others and living in a rented home. No family member has an explanation for how the Elliotts turned from homeowners into renters. By that time cotton prices had plunged, jeopardizing their ability to make a living from their farming, notwithstanding Ida and Henry’s enterprising ways. They had tried to raise corn, but that did not provide the income they needed to prosper. The plantation system that had been the hallmark of the South still favored large landholdings and cheap or free labor. Small farms, whether owned by blacks or whites, were at a competitive disadvantage. For years the Elliotts’ homestead had been mortgaged heavily, on terms that always favored the mortgage holders. Sometimes the terms even granted the lenders the right to charge whatever interest rate they saw fit and to determine the amount owed.
We do know that whatever motivated the Elliotts to pick up and leave must have been a powerful force. The combination of the violence, the threats, and the economy was probably enough to drive the family from Little River County, the only home Henry had known. My uncle George Elliott said that for the first time in his life, he saw his father, Henry, cry as they boarded the train headed for their new life in Wewoka, Oklahoma. Mixed with the memory of his father’s sadness was the excitement George felt as he embarked on his first train ride. The family members were leaving their home, their community, their vegetable garden, and the crape myrtle and pear trees. The New Hope Baptist Church—the church Henry and Ida had helped found—would be traded for a church called Paradise. But part of the family was still in Arkansas: Zodia, the oldest daughter, who was married and had a baby boy; Bettie, Ida’s stepdaughter; Rosa; and Arthur, who was not yet married. In time, the Elliott homestead would fall into the hands of the Hale family. But what mattered more to Henry and Ida was a new start. They left behind the eighty acres they once owned, and in doing so, they dared to imagine a new home for themselves and their younger children.
Chapter 2. Belonging to the New Land
Home: The place, region, or state to which one properly belongs,
in which one’s affections properly centre, or where one finds refuge, rest, or satisfaction.
The Oxford English Dictionary
In cultivating the rugged acreage in Arkansas, Henry and Ida Elliott had faced and conquered untamed land to make a home. In pulling up their roots to move the 250 miles to Seminole County, Oklahoma, they were cutting their ties to the land of their enslavement and starting over in a place where their family would be known only as free people. In 1914 Henry, now fifty years old, and Ida, forty-one, put whatever energy they had into making a new home in a new land. The terrain surrounding Wewoka, the county seat, was flatter and less forested than Little River County’s, much better suited to farming. But the state’s topography was not its biggest draw; Henry came to Oklahoma because he envisioned it as a home of promise for his children. The frontier setting, multiracial population, and uncharted social and legal environment all contributed to the popular idea that the Southern Plains location was a twentieth-century melting pot.
In 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein honored the spirit of Oklahoma with a Broadway musical named for the state. The theatrical production—set at the turn of the century, just before the Elliotts made their journey—paints a picture of Oklahoma as a romantic locale with endless opportunities for all who venture within its borders. The diverse characters in Oklahoma!, all rugged individuals with various backgrounds, come together for the communal good in the territory’s effort to achieve the holy grail of statehood. Assimilation is a theme throughout the production, and its ultimate message is one of unification, as the individuals become “we,” singing, “We know we belong to the land.” Everyone learns to get along. Aunt Eller, the show’s matriarch, speculates that once statehood is granted, the farmers, ranchers, and merchants will “all behave theirsel’s and act like brothers.” Even the musical’s staging conveys a message: men and women dance together in elaborately choreographed synchronism. In Oklahoma!, establishing a cohesive community is the key to establishing statehood.1
Interestingly—or perhaps tellingly—the musical has no specifically African American or Native American characters, and its utopian picture of assimilation and nation building hardly matches the reality of the black experience in Oklahoma before statehood. However, some read the dark-skinned Jud Fry as the racial outsider, interpreting him as either black or Native American. It is worthy of note that Jud is the play’s sole holdout from conversion to solidarity. That is, he is the one who refuses to give up his personal freedom for the good of the whole and a “unitary American identity.”2 It is further worth noting that Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II excluded racially offensive language contained in the play from which their work was adapted.3
Passed one month after Oklahoma achieved statehood, Senate Bill One mandated segregated transportation and called for violators, individual or corporate, to pay fines ranging from five to one thousand dollars. When the measure became law on December 18, 1907, it was Oklahoma’s first legislation and the signal of even more destructive race relations in the state’s future. As whites began to enter Oklahoma in greater numbers, they brought with them their sense of superiority in the racial hierarchy, as well as the violent enforcement of that hierarchy that blacks who had left Arkansas were hoping to escape.
In the early days of Oklahoma Territory, lynching was primarily a way of enforcing economic interests, and the main victims of such mob violence were white cattle rustlers. Over time, white transplants from Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi congregated in the eastern and southern parts of the territory; the southeastern corner of the state became known as Little Dixie. Following statehood, as the population growth of whites outpaced that of blacks or Indians, lynchings took on a clear racial basis. Blacks became the most frequent victims of mob violence, although Native Americans were occasionally lynched; whites rarely found themselves on the wrong side of the vigilantes’ noose. In 1904 Boynton, an eastern Oklahoma Territory town, was the site of a race riot that left at least one black resident dead. In nearby Henryetta in 1907, white residents lynched a black man accused of murder, then torched the black neighborhood.4 Through law and lawlessness, the promise of Oklahoma as a utopian melting pot faded. The state emerged in racial custom and culture as a Dixie outpost.
Even with all its flaws, Oklahoma came to be seen as an appealing alternative to life in the South. Beginning in the 1890s, activists promoted the notion of colonizing the state for blacks; although the idea never materialized, a proposal to make Oklahoma a “black state” reportedly went as far as the president, first to Benjamin Harrison and later to Theodore Roosevelt.5 In neighboring Kansas, William L. Eagleson, an African American newspaper editor, founded the Oklahoma Immigration Association to achieve the goal of resettling one hundred thousand blacks from southern states to Oklahoma. He teamed with Edward P. McCabe, Kansas’s first black state auditor, to buy land to incorporate black towns. His plan also included enfranchisement; the politically savvy McCabe worked to establish blacks in various locations in numbers significant enough to constitute voting blocs.
Blacks responded. A group of delegates even went to Washington to protest the enactment of Senate Bill One, but President Roosevelt refused to interfere with the state’s autonomy. Despite the open hostility directed toward blacks, or maybe because of it, black towns sprang up vi
rtually overnight. Blacks then occupied settlements carved out of the territories that had belonged to the Creek, Seminole, and Choctaw nations. Black townships developed parallel to white towns, mixed towns, and Indian towns. Outside of organized municipalities, black enclaves provided a kind of community and security unattainable in multiracial settings.
After statehood, Oklahoma became well known for all-black towns like Boley and Langston, planned communities run by black governments that were often associated with economic opportunities and access to the railroads. These homogenous towns were a response to both the freedom Oklahoma promised and the racial animus blacks experienced there. The federal government sanctioned racial separation with the Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld segregation on trains. For whites, the Plessy reasoning meant that blacks could be separated not just on trains, but in all political and economic capacities. Separate municipalities were a logical extension. Blacks also followed the Plessy logic, engaging in preemptive segregation by establishing towns as expressions of black independence and self-determination: by us, for us.
By 1914, when the Elliotts determined that Arkansas could no longer be their home and that Liberia was not a feasible option, they joined the ranks of blacks who chose to keep the United States as their nation-home. Even as they boarded a segregated train to Oklahoma, they attempted to redefine what that citizenship meant to them. Lone Tree, the community the Elliotts settled in not long after the move to Wewoka, bore similarities to the all-black townships.
Although Henry and Ida never again owned a home, that did not stop them from looking for security and a chance to belong. They found it in family and in the church. By 1930 Henry and Ida lived in a black enclave in rural Oklahoma surrounded by family members. Zodia, Ida and Henry’s oldest, was estranged from her husband and lived nearby with her four children and a boarder she took in to help make ends meet. My mother, Erma, was Henry and Ida’s youngest daughter; she and my father and their first child lived and farmed within walking distance of her parents. So did two of my uncles. Henry’s stepmother, Alice, lived with Henry and Ida and their youngest son, Floyd. Henry’s sister Ann joined him in Oklahoma before moving on to Missouri and Nebraska, where she made her home in Omaha.