The Lost Boys

by Gina Perry

  Up ahead, OJ caught a movement. A mob of cattle was travelling slowly across a field and were headed for the road.

  ‘Dr Sherif, there’s some cattle up there.’

  ‘I see them.’

  ‘You might want to slow down.’

  ‘Oh’, Sherif said, ‘I’m okay,’ and kept his foot to the gas.

  ‘Slow down!’ OJ said urgently, as the steers moved into the centre of the road. But Sherif didn’t pause. OJ leaned across and slammed his hand on the horn. The steers scattered to the edge, but a big Hereford bull had stopped in the middle of the road.

  OJ squeezed his eyes shut at the last minute and felt the car swerve. His body was flung hard against the door, then away again, as Sherif zigzagged up the road. When he opened his eyes, Sherif was thumping the wheel, exhilarated.

  ‘Pull over, Dr Sherif,’ OJ said through gritted teeth. ‘Pull over.’

  ‘I handled that well, didn’t I?’ Sherif said proudly, slowing to a stop.

  But OJ didn’t answer. He flung open the car door and stood out on the road, taking deep breaths until he felt calm enough to get back in the car and take the wheel. It seemed a metaphor for what happened when Sherif was allowed to take charge, and OJ vowed as he opened the driver’s side door and slid behind the wheel that he wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

  At schools across Oklahoma City in the spring of 1953, OJ stood at the edge of the yard watching fifth-graders at play. This time he was looking for a different kind of boy than the ones they had recruited in the past. This time he would target athletes, boys who thrived on competition, with average grades. They would be ‘normal’ white Protestant and middle-class boys with no obvious physical or emotional problems; this time there’d be no bedwetters, no loners, no truants. Among the flurry of activity on the playground — the pock of the ball on the bat, the cries of the children — OJ watched to see who ran fastest, who rallied teammates with shouts of encouragement during the games.

  Sixty years later, OJ was still proud of how he talked his way into the Oklahoma City school system and how he convinced the Director of Elementary Schools to write to principals in schools across the city, giving him access to detailed student records so he could select just the right boys for what he told them was research on leadership. Once he’d chosen a boy, OJ contacted parents by phone, an informal and more effective method than writing a letter in a place like Oklahoma City. The fact that he was from the University of Oklahoma opened doors. It was home to the Sooners football team and the legendary coach Bud Wilkinson, whose recent winning streak — including the first of what would be three national championships — had fanned a religious-style football fervour across Oklahoma, reinstating badly dented state pride. The Sooners were revered, and their home university basked in reflected goodwill. Add to that OJ’s gentleness, his respectful manner, and his Oklahoma accent, and he won parents’ trust.

  OJ told parents ‘the truth but not the whole truth’, describing the camp as a chance to study which boys would become leaders and which would become followers. This might have appealed to parents’ Cold War era anxieties, and all of them, OJ said, were pleased and enthusiastic about their boys taking part. He asked them to promise not to come visit because it caused homesickness. Welcoming a native Oklahoman into their homes, one who had none of the airs and graces they would normally expect of a university man, these lower-middle-class and working-class parents would have had no inkling that OJ was worried about the experiment ahead.

  This time there was no nurse, no camp director, no Herb Kelman to play scientific conscience, and a much-diminished staff team. Things were both simpler and more complicated. Sherif and OJ had streamlined the theory they were testing to make it more achievable. They abandoned the hypothesis Sherif had started out with in 1953, that group loyalty overrides friendship. At Robbers Cave, they left prior friendships out of it altogether: this time, they wouldn’t allow the boys even to meet before the competitions, let alone become friendly. But finding boys who didn’t know one another — even if OJ did select them from twenty-four different schools — was a challenge in Oklahoma City in the pre-TV era, when the locale had a strong social network, and OJ ended up with just twenty-two boys.

  Running the experiment with only four staff, OJ knew that a ‘hands off’ approach would be impossible. Participant observers Jack White and Sherif’s newest graduate student Bob Hood — a former pharmacist from the small town of Guthrie who was a private, sweet-tempered man — would have to pitch in with the junior counsellors to run activities with the boys. Even with the best organisation, the day-to-day workload was going to be gruelling. Sherif’s role, too, was more complicated. OJ worried that the boys would be apprehensive about someone with such a heavy foreign accent in a time when fear and suspicion towards foreigners was intense. So he introduced Sherif as his friend, who would help out with caretaking. But above all there was the pressure: this last attempt with the dregs of the money from the Rockefeller Foundation, and Sherif’s reputation at stake. OJ was conscious that he was both the glue and the buffer that would hold the group of four together. ‘It was an ingroup amongst us really, it was a case of high loyalty to Sherif. Jack and Bob weren’t as close to him as I was, but they respected him and they were gung-ho.’ Yet OJ knew that the ties that bound them could be tested.

  Bill Snipes, a round-faced boy with a cheeky smile, sat in the back seat of the bus between a scowling boy called Red and a small boy with a toothpick that he worked in the corner of his mouth, called Hollis. There were half a dozen boys on the school bus that OJ hired by the time they got to north side of Oklahoma City. Unlike the boys from the 1953 study, many on this bus wore well-tended hand-me-downs and carefully patched jeans.

  Northside was the wealthier part of town, and Red made a fuss when a group of northside boys boarded, shouting, ‘Only southsiders up back!’ None of the newcomers objected. Red was bigger than all of them and looked ready for a fight, so they meekly took their places behind the driver.

  By Holdenville, Bill Snipes had left the back seat and was swaying in the aisle between a group of boys up front, leaning to look out the window every so often to announce the number of miles to McAlester each time he saw a sign. For Bill, the diminishing miles to their destination was something to celebrate. His parents had never been able to afford to send him away to camp, and he was excited to have been picked. For Smut Smith, a pale lick of a boy who had found it hard to say goodbye to his parents that morning, it was only the beginning of the realisation of exactly how far away this camp was.

  A cheer went up at the end of the four-hour drive when the bus slowed off the dirt road and passed through the park’s entrance, marked by a pyramid of logs painted white to spell out Robbers Cave State Park.

  Before it was named Oklahoma, this was known as ‘Indian’ territory, the final destination on what Native Americans called the Trail of Tears, a dangerous and anguished journey for the hundreds of thousands of Native Americans forcibly removed from their ancestral lands. Pressured by white settlers who coveted the rich farmland, the tribes were forced by the federal government to leave their homelands and walk more than a thousand miles with few supplies to the new ‘Indian’ territory across the Mississippi. The Choctaw tribe established the Choctaw Nation here; Robbers Cave State Park was on their land.

  The first time I visited Robbers Cave State Park, it struck me that it had a long history of intergroup conflict, especially after what had been thought of as barren new land turned out to be rich with oil and gold. I wished I’d thought to ask OJ whether and how the subject matter of Sherif’s theory about animosity and prejudice between groups fighting over resources related to OJ’s own life, and the poverty and dispossession of Native Americans he saw growing up in Corinne, not far from Robbers Cave, as a child.

  The new territory had a reputation for lawlessness. Rich in gold and oil, it was a magnet for rogues. The San Bois Mount
ains, with their caves, became a hiding place for train robbers, bank robbers, gangs, gunfighters, and desperadoes. Just a few years earlier, the park’s caretaker had found bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd’s haul of stolen gold jewellery buried in mud when he was netting minnows in the park’s stream. And the place was built by lawbreakers. It was carved out of the forest back in 1931 by a construction gang of fifteen prisoners from nearby Oklahoma State Penitentiary. For the prisoners, four white and eleven black men, who worked for months without a guard building the stone huts, digging and laying water pipes, and constructing fences, it must have been a welcome but brief taste of freedom before they were returned to the darkness of their cells.

  The Division of State Parks brochure made the location’s dark past sound romantic: ‘The Robbers Cave … is the legendary hideout of Belle Starr, the James Brothers, and other colorful early-day outlaws. Legends of hidden treasure, outlaw trails and gun battles with law enforcement officers stir the imagination of young park visitors.’ I couldn’t avoid the thought that the experiment that unfolded there was a continuation of this place’s past, where the line between the good guys and the bad was blurry, and it was difficult to know who to trust.

  Off the bus, the boys followed their counsellor between the trees to a stone cabin with a large chimney and a brown-shingled roof, which sat halfway between a recreation hall and a mess hall. Back then, the site was used as a boy-scout camp. Built of the same stone, with the same brown roofs, the camp buildings merged into the environment as if they were camouflaged. The air in the bunkhouse was dusty and close, and the boys would have headed off enthusiastically to the swimming hole. So too did Sherif, as he moved silently from tree to tree, tracking the boys as they made their way to the creek.

  ‘We wouldn’t call them a group yet. At first they were just a bunch of boys,’ OJ said. ‘So we had to do something about that.’ At lunchtime, OJ and Sherif joined the boys on the pretext of bringing food and watched as they decided how to divide up the slab of ham, the unsliced bread, and the whole watermelon. ‘It was deliberate,’ OJ said. ‘We created situations of interdependence where they had to rely on one another, to divide food, to carry canoes and equipment.’ The men memorised who coordinated lunch preparations, who cut up the meat, who sliced the bread, who carved the watermelon and served it. After lunch, the boys spent the rest of the afternoon placing rocks as steps to the swimming hole and building up a rockpile to dive from. Red, the aggressive boy on the bus, directed their activities, and the men noted how the rest of the boys seemed to follow his lead.

  The next morning, the boys took the path that climbed up through the trees above the camp to the stone corral at the base of the Robbers Cave, which, with its spring and grass, was a perfect place for outlaws to water, feed, and hide their horses. By midday they reached the top of the steep climb to Robbers Cave. After the exertion of the climb and the build-up, Smut was disappointed at how small the cave was. He was expecting something much bigger, but the cave was long and narrow, like a collapsed house of cards. Stone slabs were piled precariously on top of one another so that the cave’s entrance was at the bottom of a steep slit in the rocks.

  Bob Hood told them in his slow drawl how this opening was just the beginning, that down in the darkness the rocks had formed crevices and canyons and secret passageways that led to more hidden caves.

  ‘Can we go in and have a look?’ Red wanted to know.

  Hood shrugged as if to say, It’s up to you.

  ‘C’mon!’ Red called to the others.

  One boy made his way closer to the entrance and wrinkled his nose at the stale air that wafted up from the cave. ‘I’m not going in there,’ he said, pushing his hands into his pockets as if to indicate that was that.

  ‘Me neither,’ another boy said.

  Then a chorus of relief.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘Some other time.’

  They were city boys and weren’t quite brave enough to go clambering around in the dark.

  But Red seemed to take their reluctance to go in as a challenge. ‘I’m no yellowbelly,’ he said. Even though he was the biggest boy, and he wouldn’t have been able to squeeze into some of the smaller spaces that someone like Hollis would be able to negotiate, he took Hood’s torch and disappeared inside the rocks.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the boys climbed the rock above the cave and stood on the edge of a precipice that jutted out over a valley of pine trees, cooeeing and yelling, listening to their smaller- and younger-sounding voices echoing back from the other side.

  They were getting impatient by the time Red emerged ten minutes later. Hood noticed how the boy had created a tension within the group but also how, after this trip inside the cave, he set the pace. If Red did something, such as climb a particularly high rock, Hollis was right behind him, and most of the other boys would do the same. They might have been too fearful to climb down into a dark cave, but in the sunlight they could pretend to be brave.

  Unbeknown to the boys, as they were climbing the rocks above the cave on their second day, far down below another bus had arrived. A second group of boys who thought they had the place to themselves were disembarking, with Jack White, and carrying their things to a stone cabin on the other side of a small hill almost a mile away.

  The men kept the two groups ignorant of each other during the first three days, making sure their paths didn’t cross. It wasn’t difficult: the two cabins were over a mile apart, at opposite ends of the camp. A pretty mountain stream flowed through the park, ending at peaceful Lake Carlton, where they could use boats and canoes. But the stream, named the Fourche Maline by early French explorers, translates into English as ‘treacherous fork’.

  Taking the lead on the research team was a challenge for OJ. At night, the men convened at 9.00 pm in the makeshift office that doubled as OJ and Sherif’s sleeping quarters. A fan usually creaked on the table, stirring the hot air and ruffling the notecards OJ had laid out on the desk, detailing their hypotheses. ‘I wanted to go through it methodically, let Jack and Bob offer their observations and evidence for each hypothesis from what they had observed during that day, but Sherif was eager. He was so eager that he practically jumped on them when they came through the door and chided them if they were even a few minutes late.’ OJ shook his head. ‘I had to get him under control. Jack and Bob were determined to do a good job — they were under pressure, as we all were, and Sherif was overstepping the line.’ OJ was determined to remind Sherif of the ‘ground rules’.

  Did those ground rules include the fact that OJ was in charge?

  OJ rolled his eyes and nodded. ‘They sure did.’

  How did Sherif react, I was curious to know.

  ‘He acted upset, raised his voice, that kind of thing. But he knew I was not one to be bossed around. And he knew I didn’t like to see him doing it to others.’

  I suggested that with his doctorate completed and his position at Yale on the horizon, OJ might have found it easier than he had the year before to stand up to Sherif. But he shook his head. ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But no, it was not easier. It was an uncomfortable feeling — I was always waiting for when he would blow up next. It hung over me and I couldn’t relax. I had a deal of trouble sleeping.’

  Hood took his group away on a two-night camping trip so that White’s newly arrived boys could have the run of the park and spend their first few days swimming, playing ballgames, and taking their turn exploring the cave and its surrounds.

  Hood and the boys hiked to a site four miles away. When they set out after breakfast, the air was velvety. The colours of the bush were still bright and the shade deep. By the time they reached their camping spot, the sky was a hard blue, and they were itching with dried sweat. The boys had to build latrines, put up tents, chop wood, and cook their own lunch with little help from the adults, all with the aim of cementing friendships. It
sounded more like army life than a fun summer camp to me, but the boys seemed taken with the novelty of it all. ‘I was a city boy from a poor area and I hadn’t been in that kind of environment before,’ Smut Smith remembers. ‘I had stayed on my Aunt Leela May and Uncle Harley’s farm in Texas, but this wasn’t like a farm. The Robbers Cave wasn’t like anywhere I’d ever been before. It was exciting. We spent a lot of time swimming and hiking and exploring. It was a real adventure.’

  In the late afternoon, the men took them out canoeing. Bill Snipes and Smut were in Bob Hood’s canoe, and the boys took turns paddling across the lake, with Bill keeping up an excited commentary on everybody’s stroke. As they moved close to the reeds, they heard a commotion. Two snakes had hold of a large frog. Each snake had one of the frog’s legs in its mouth, and they were thrashing about in the water. The boys stopped paddling, drifting as they watched in fascinated horror.

  ‘Look at that!’

  ‘Whoa!’’

  A loud crack and a boom made them jump. Birds exploded from the trees, shrieking. They turned to see Bob Hood aiming a gun and firing, boom, a second time. When they turned back, a spray of water was shooting up where the snakes had been, and the frog was gone. The sound seemed deafening, and it rang out and echoed back at them across the water. The boys looked at the quiet man sliding his gun back into a holster with a combination of fear and awe. Bill and Smut had never seen a real gun before, let alone a man shooting one.

  That night around the campfire, Red and another boy argued about whether the snakes were water moccasins or copperheads. Hollis, a small boy with the authoritative air of someone who spent a lot of time around adults, announced they were rattlesnakes and suggested the boys should name their group after the snakes. Then he got them to vote on a name.