But we did not. Not then.
We fell asleep at 7:00 p.m., tired from all the chair-moving and cooking. We went across the border to Mexico for two days and ate lobster and buttered fresh tortillas. On the third day, we packed up the tiny Honda Civic and drove until we got to Tulsa.
My dad had taken all of us kids in a station wagon to Yellowstone, the Colorado Rockies, and Grand Canyon, but I’d never been to the South. Dwayne’s father had taken all his kids in a station wagon to Oklahoma when they were young, but Dwayne hadn’t been back. General II wanted us to stay with his father’s brother, Uncle Lanier Sims, and his wife, Mozelle, who were in their seventies.
Their brick house in north Tulsa was beautiful and quiet. They stared at me, narrow-eyed. I don’t think they knew their great-nephew was bringing a blond wife. On the couch, showing us baby pictures in photo albums, they told me the story of one of America’s worst racial conflicts, which had been kept secret for decades. The polite, composed elderly couple, with golden skin and hair combed back and held firmly in place, had nearly died because of a white woman.
In 1921, Greenwood, a square of businesses and homes extending several miles in the heart of Tulsa, was the wealthiest black community in America. Movie theaters, banks, barbershops, stores, restaurants, and churches, most of them imposing brick buildings. Black people had migrated to Tulsa from many places, but especially Texas and Mississippi. W. Stanford and Minerva Sims, parents of General and Lanier Sims, left Grenada, Mississippi, in 1900 for Oklahoma. Their son General was not yet a year old.
Stanford was one of eleven children of Cary and Henrietta Sims, born in 1849 and 1853, both formerly enslaved; Minerva was one of eleven children of Albert and Ella Hardiman, born in 1849 and 1852, both formerly enslaved. Back in Grenada, both husbands were sons of white overseers and enslaved women; both wives were daughters of African and indigenous-descended parents.
Stanford and Minerva first settled in Muskogee, where he was a teacher and she raised General and her second son, Lanier. But at some point, though Stanford was teaching in Muskogee, Minerva and the boys went to live twenty-five miles away in Tulsa. Here is where the family story gets murky; no one has ever found out the truth. Stanford finished teaching on a Friday, January 11, 1905, but was not allowed on the train to Tulsa. It is said that he walked for miles on the tracks but froze to death. It is also said that Minerva was unhappy with him and he was somehow poisoned. After his death, the two boys went for a time to an orphanage in Broken Bow, Indian Territory. Eventually, Minerva retrieved them.
In every photo of Minerva, she does not smile. Always judgmental and dissatisfied, her face thin and eyes half-lidded, her mouth turned down, she was especially hard on her eldest son, General. If the freakish Spaniards had conferred with her, General would have been classified as torna atrás, and that altered everything about his life. His brother Lanier was light-skinned, like his father. General was brown-skinned, darker than both his parents. Minerva was open with her favoritism, especially after Stanford died.
Lanier married Mozelle Sims, one of eleven children of parents who were Creek freedpeople, black men and women who had been enslaved by Creek Nation people before the Civil War, and forced along with their owners to walk the Trail of Tears from Creek land in Georgia to Oklahoma. After Emancipation, Creek freedmen and women were each deeded eighty acres of land; Mozelle and her sisters owned acreage outside Tulsa.
This matters because in January 1921, the black people of Tulsa were independent, powerful, often landowners, survivors already of war and conflict on many fronts, and then the men returned from World War I with their brown uniforms and their military weapons, and their pride. Greenwood swelled with prosperity, in full view of white downtown, and white Tulsa didn’t like black pride.
Dick Rowland, a young black man working downtown, entered an elevator, and a white woman, Nancy Pettis, claimed he had assaulted her (maybe he stepped on her foot, caught off guard when the elevator moved). He was arrested, and that night, a white Tulsa mob went to the jail intent on hanging him. He was seventeen.
The mob was met by a wall of black men, many in uniform with their service weapons. The night was described by Lanier and other relatives as open warfare—hundreds of armed men shooting one another. Then truckloads of white Tulsans and white men from outlying areas entered Greenwood, shooting men, women, children, systematically torching houses and churches and businesses. I have seen the postcards made from photographs taken by white people. These show the burned bodies of black men, hands curled into frozen fight or surrender, feet unrecognizable, and the slanted handwriting below: Dead nigers in Tulsa, Oklahoma January 10, 1921. There are many versions of this postcard, with different scenes.
Black Tulsans killed many white men, too. The National Guard was called, and then the unthinkable happened: Federal aircraft, piloted by National Guardsmen, dropped gasoline bombs onto Greenwood. Tanks entered the area. Black homes and churches were looted, and black residents were herded into the Tulsa Fairgrounds. Black bodies and white bodies were said to have been thrown into the river. These men were friends and neighbors of the Sims family. No one knows how many people died.
One baby was born, that first night. Mozelle Sims was seventeen, married for ten months, and alone. Her husband, Lanier, at work downtown, had been told to leave the city right away by his employer, so he wouldn’t be killed. Mozelle knew none of this. Mobs were shooting people, throwing kerosene into homes and then torches, and Mozelle went into labor. She didn’t know how to drive, but she got into Lanier’s car, stepped on the gas, and drove as far from the city as she could. She made it to an area where other black people had gathered, in the countryside. There, she had her son, among strangers.
When she and Lanier found each other days later, they were taken to the fairgrounds, where thousands of people were held by armed National Guard, given badges and tags. Mozelle and her newborn slept in a stable. She and Lanier had planned to name him Stanford, after his grandfather. But there was no way to record his birth or his name for six days, and by the end of their imprisonment, they decided to name him Charles Wesley.
I try to imagine now what Mozelle thought, telling this to a twenty-two-year-old white girl from California. I flash back to the countless American histories of violence and murder built around those terrible moments: a white girl or woman, a woman who looked like me, a story so often not true, an idea that became a rasp and origin spark, like the click of a lighter held by an arsonist.
Their kindness to me was astonishing.
In the morning, we went out to Rentie Grove, a historic black community founded in 1880 by the Rentie and Walker familes, Creek freedpeople, where Mozelle had eighty acres. Dwayne had stayed here when he was eight, and the land was still farmed by relatives, including Mozelle’s sister Georgia, who kept a pistol in her apron pocket.
We touched the headstone of General Sims, Dwayne’s grandfather, who died when Dwayne’s father, General II, was only seven. Then we touched the marker for Beloved Grandmother, Finey Kemp, 1874–1952.
Dwayne stood in the long dry grass, near a snakeskin like a sinuous ghost, and said to me, “Grandma Fine saved them all. That’s what Daddy always said. He said they were starving out here and their other grandma, Minnie, came and took them to the orphanage. But Fine went and got them all back and then she went to Minnie’s house and pulled a gun and told Minnie to never take her grandkids again.”
Fine, the little girl who’d survived the world completely alone; Fine, whose daughter Callie had married Minerva’s son General, knew Minerva as a woman who’d always had two parents, back in Mississippi, and eleven brothers and sisters, and a house.
Before she rested there, in Tulsa, Fine had survived alone in Tennessee, and then she had survived her second husband in Texas.
In 1902, Fine had married the older man who invited her and her three children into his house in Denton, Texas. Zach Rollins was thirty years older than Fine. He was the son of a white slaveowne
r and an enslaved woman, born in Grenada, Mississippi, in 1848, and brought to the countryside near Denton as a slave by his own father, in 1863. He was only fifteen. Freed after the Civil War, he registered to vote in 1867, had a daughter named Mollie that year, but didn’t marry. By 1876, he had worked so hard and was so ambitious that he and another former slave purchased eighty acres of homestead land for $400. He married in 1880, was a widower soon after, raising his daughter alone. He married again in 1884, and was again a widower soon after. Either his wives were very unlucky in their illnesses, or he was a difficult man to survive. I wonder often what Fine knew, or guessed, after she and her children walked into his house the first time. But she made her calculations of existence.
By 1900, he had left his homestead and moved to Oakland Avenue, across from the Denton County Courthouse. He was “elected” the courthouse custodian. In 1902, he married “Fin Hofford,” and after that she was known as “Vinie Rollins.” Their son James was born in 1903, and Callie was born in 1906. But Fine’s daughter Jennie had fled when she was about fourteen, and her brother Mack was dead by the time he was ten or eleven.
According to what Fine told her grandchildren, Zach Rollins was immediately violent and brutally abusive to his stepchildren. Jennie ran away to Tulsa; Mack, who was frail and disabled, was beaten often. He died in 1909. By the 1910 federal census, the household still contained Floyd, Fine’s second son, born back in Tennessee, who was listed as fifteen years old, mulatto; James, seven, mulatto; and Callie, four, mulatto. In fact, the entire street, Oakland Avenue, is listed as having mulatto residents.
The house must have been a traumatic place to live. And by 1911, Zach Rollins was suddenly dead, at sixty-five. On his death certificate, the primary cause is chronic bronchitis, which had lasted only one month; the secondary cause is listed as somatic dissociation.
Today, somatic dissociation is defined as neurological symptoms related to memory or identity, not caused by disease but by past trauma or psychological stress. Zach Rollins had survived slavery, had been brought as a teen by his father, the man who owned him, to rough Texas land recently fought over by troops and indigenous Comanches. He had probably witnessed the same violent horrors, and different horrors, as had his wife, Fine.
Now she was thirty-three years old, living in a house that was not hers, with three children. Fine told her grandchildren that white relatives of the Rawlings family (spellings are varied), from the slaveowner Dan Rawlings’s legal marriage, began to claim the property, taking farm equipment, livestock, and even furniture from the land. Fine believed that someone had poisoned her son James, whose body and mind deteriorated to the point of complete disability.
She wrote to her daughter Jennie, who was about twenty-three then. Fine and the children went to Tulsa, where Jennie gave them her room in the residential hotel where she lived. Jennie went to stay with a friend. Fine got work as a domestic and enrolled Callie in school. She was determined that her youngest child would graduate from high school and go to college.
By the time Dwayne and I left Tulsa, and drove through West Virginia and Pennsylvania and then up to Massachusetts, my head was full of history and family and American landscape. I had written four short stories, with young characters fleeing violence and poverty. That year, other writers, and professors, in my graduate program at Amherst questioned my work: “You can’t use words like this. Not standard English.” “Aren’t you from California? Why don’t you write about surfing?” “Why do you keep writing about all these working-class people?” This last term I had never heard, and the sneer in the voice of the graduate student, a woman from Smith College, confused me so much that I had no reply.
That night, after Dwayne went to work night shift at the juvenile correctional facility in a small Massachusetts town twenty miles away, I thought: What the hell is working class? Work or welfare—those two were the only conditions of life back home. You got a paycheck job! Kaiser Steel, Toro lawnmowers, Rockwell aircraft, Alcan aluminum, Goodyear tires. You under the table, man? That meant cash-only economy, for everyone else—housepainting, yard work, construction, shade-tree mechanic, and drug dealing. The only other category was welfare.
Two of my professors refused to call on me in class, and gave me failing grades, one claiming that a research paper was plagiarized because the last page was more yellowed than the rest; I had a job cleaning houses, had worked all day, finished the paper at 2:00 a.m. and had to find a random sheet in an old folder on the windowsill, because Dwayne was gone with the car to work. The professor said derisively that he’d seen me walking with a tall black man, and I said that was my husband. The professor said that Amherst was not California. Dwayne was so furious that he actually walked me to class, as if we were in high school; he stood in the doorway, glaring at the professor and the rest of the students. Then they were afraid of me.
We had James Baldwin. His class and friendship were lifesaving. But after workshop, he held court in a local bar, where everyone tried to get close to him. Dwayne and I went once to the bar; the bouncer refused to let us in. He said California licenses were not valid in his eyes. His glare said we were black and white. He folded his arms. I thought Dwayne would punch him. We never went back.
But Dwayne punched a different guy, who taunted him and poked him in the eye during a YMCA basketball league. Dwayne was the only black player. He quit the league. Then ice shrouded the apartment complex where we lived. I cooked huge pots of refried beans to make us feel at home, and Dwayne turned up the heat and wore shorts. I had worked as a housecleaner, as a parking lot attendant, and delivered newspapers to hundreds of rural road boxes before dawn. But I could write about nothing else but home, even if I’d never sell anything.
On our honeymoon in Rosarito, Mexico, while Dwayne slept, I’d gone down to the beach to write in my notebook a story called “Buddah,” about a teenager who keeps himself alive by stealing food and cars. Now I began a story called “Training,” based on two things that haunted me: A friend had killed himself by standing in front of the train that rolled above my neighborhood, and a nephew stopped speaking and was put into “educationally handicapped” classrooms.
Other professors saved me—Margo Culley introduced me to the novels of women such as Leslie Marmon Silko and Harriet Arnow, who wrote of home. I was given Flannery O’Connor and endless encouragement by Jay Neugeboren, and advice by Julius Lester, who kept saying, “Why are there so many damn helicopters and guns in your stories? Do you live in Saigon?”
And then, one afternoon at his home, while Dwayne played basketball in the driveway with Skip and Rico, James Baldwin spoke to me gently about my story of a young woman robbed at gunpoint on a Los Angeles bus. He told me the entire story hinged on the moments she spent at work with a man named Leonard. “It is always the secondary characters who save us,” he said. Then he smiled, the way his whole face broke open. “You must continue to write. It is imperative.”
I loved that word. Imperative.
Dwayne thought winter was a joke. I’d driven hundreds of careful miles delivering those newspapers. Dwayne drove at night to his job. When people warned him, he kept laughing. “Black ice? I’m a black man. Black ice don’t want to hurt me.”
He spun into a chestnut tree hundreds of years old, on a rural road, with a juvenile prisoner in the passenger seat, transporting the boy from a police station. The Honda was totaled. The kid hurt his knee. Dwayne had a burn all along his chest and shoulder from the force of the seat belt, and a severe concussion. Someone dropped him off that night, at our tiny apartment.
He was in shock. He lay in bed shivering violently. The snow fell all night, and the temperature dropped to minus 24. He threw up so many times into my only large cooking pot that nothing was left but bile and I didn’t know what bile was. I called my mother, three thousand miles away on Christmas Eve, and she said, “Give him water. Nothing else.” She sounded as dispassionate as my grandmother Rosa Leu, but possibly she was worried and didn’t want me
to lose my mind.
I gave Dwayne 7 Up. He vomited. I gave him milk. He vomited. I called her again, and now she sounded exasperated. “Did you give him water?” Water had seemed perfunctory. Uncaring. But I did. A spoonful, like a child. He didn’t vomit. Every hour, I gave him another spoonful. The snow piled outside our window, behind my typewriter and the boombox, and he finally slept.
I lay beside him in the dark and wrote an entire short story in a notebook. An eighty-year-old woman and her husband, a former miner who has black lung disease. In my mind, I saw his great-aunt Mozelle, though this night had nothing to do with her. I just saw her face, her calm equanimity, her ministrations, and I heard her voice.
We bought a used red Renault from an Algerian guy, for $500. We left before the graduation ceremony, because there was no one to watch me, and we wanted to go home. The car broke down on many days. Through upstate New York, I told Dwayne the stories of Joyce Carol Oates. Through Pennsylvania, I told him the novels of Pete Dexter and David Bradley. In Ohio, I made him drive around Lorain, and told him every novel by Toni Morrison. That week, he was reading Dune, by Frank Herbert. Finally, we went through Las Vegas, and then the state line of California, the Renault barely shuddering.
Dwayne parked it in front of my parents’ house, and it never again moved of its own volition until we sold it for $200 to two of my first students here in California: Hmong teenagers from the highlands of Laos, whose fathers had worked for the CIA during the Vietnam War. The boys were car mechanics to whom I taught English as a Second Language.
15
Fruitful #2
Riverside, California, 1989
In the Country of Women Page 12