By the close of 1916, as the United States neared intervention in the war and as German U-boats declared open season on neutral steamships, Choc Floyd and his family prepared to plow fresh fields near their new and larger home. They had moved only a few miles from Hanson to Akins, another Sequoyah County farming community located about eight miles northeast of Sallisaw. Walter’s parents, Charles and Mary Floyd, and his younger brothers, Buman and Burley, lived in Akins, and they maintained some productive farmland nearby. Now, with Walter and Mamie’s sizable brood residing in Akins, the entire community seemed to be dominated by the Floyd clan.
Akins became Choc Floyd’s favorite place to live. Years later, no matter where he roamed, Choc told folks that only one place was his home: Akins, Oklahoma.
Long before any of the Floyds arrived on the scene, Akins had been called Sweet Town, probably because of all the sorghum molasses that was made there. In 1890, a post office was established and the village took the name of Winchester, but that post office lasted only one year and then was discontinued. In 1894, the postal service reestablished another office in one of the general stores, and a short time later, the town became known as Akins, after Robert Akin, a former postman.
The town boasted a few small grocery stores, a barber, blacksmith, and a cotton gin. The Baptists had worshipped at a church in Akins since 1885. They kept a strict watch on their flock and enforced scriptural discipline. Church members who gossiped, used profane language, or were caught picking strawberries, fishing, or dancing on the Sabbath were brought before the elders. Freight wagons hauled supplies out to Akins from Sallisaw, and there were doctors, preachers, a justice of the peace, and a constable to help keep life civil. Over the years, the town’s school had grown from a plain cabin with a floor divided by smooth split logs for the girls and a dirt floor for the boys to a two-story log house. Later, a one-room boxed building arose, and, in 1909, the last schoolhouse was built. Here the younger Floyd children attended classes. It was a two-story frame building and the second floor was used as a meeting place for the Woodmen of the World, for the Odd Fellows, and as a rehearsal hall for the town’s brass band. Walter Floyd and other Masons in good standing, who belonged to Mt. Moriah Lodge No. 29, also met at the schoolhouse from 1914 until 1920, when they consolidated with a Masonic lodge at Sallisaw.
Akins provided a real feeling of kinship. This was evident back in 1903 when the residents set up the first community Christmas tree, lighted with candles and trimmed with popcorn and wild holly berries and tufts of cotton for snow. There was much food and drink and some of the boys shot clumps of mistletoe out of the treetops. Legend held that mistletoe, a parasite that would one day become the official state flower of Oklahoma, was once a larger tree, but when the wood was used for the Cross on which Christ was crucified, the tree shriveled in shame. The boys in Akins did not put much stock in the old legend. Rather, they cared about finding an excuse to kiss a pretty girl who passed beneath a sprig of mistletoe tacked in a doorjamb. Sam Martin, a local farmer who dressed like Santa Claus in a white robe, walked through town ringing a cowbell. Families exchanged gifts with one another, and years later, everyone still talked about the fancy saddle that Perry Boydston received that Christmas.
Through the years, people continued to meet for dances and on special occasions at someone’s dogtrot home, a cabin characterized by an open breezeway between the living quarters. They also pitched horseshoes or watched the local boys, including the Floyd brothers, play baseball in a cleared hayfield.
Some of the best-known families in the region settled in or around Akins. The one-room log cabin built in 1828 by Sequoyah, the lame mixed-blood who developed the eighty-five-character Cherokee syllabary, was still standing just a few miles east of Akins. The cabin was occupied by a family who had purchased the homesite from the celebrated Sequoyah’s widow. Besides the Cherokees who lived in the area, there were many other descendants from white families in Georgia and neighboring southern states. Choc Floyd came to know all their surnames, whether they had Indian blood or not. Many of the Akins families followed a pattern similar to the Floyds; they had also first settled at the railroad town of Hanson when they had arrived in Oklahoma. Faulkner, Boydston, Amos, Fullbright, Cheek, Lessley, Humphrey, Fine, Wickett, Green, Lattimore, Masterson, Mills, Gann, and Miller were but some of the family names associated with Akins. Choc’s sisters and brothers and the many Floyd cousins married into these families and started families of their own.
They were all hardworking people without much book learning, but they possessed common sense and the ability to fend for themselves. They held to the customs of another time and never considered them to be superstitions but, rather, simply habits and traditions that deserved to be respected and kept. Many of these customs were taken from the Indians; for example, the Cherokee belief that if a person pointed at a rainbow, the bone would come out of the fingertip; the Creek warning never to step on a grave, especially a child’s, or the trespasser’s feet would ache for at least a week. Others were sayings, remedies, and cures that their grandparents had been taught when they were children.
There were curious adages, such as the one that contended that when babies smiled in their sleep, they were talking to angels, or that toads brought warts to the hands of those who touched them. Some of the old women swore that they could get rid of rats by writing them a letter and sealing it with butter. Those same crones paid close attention to the exact day of the week when they trimmed their fingernails. They believed that each itch and pain had a secret meaning, as did every dropped spoon and dishrag or the time of year when a frog croaked and the dandelions bloomed.
In the absence of scientific technology, the country folks watched the weather signs. The clouds, sun, and sky were accurate indicators and much of the other forecasting was the result of observing animal behavior. If a hound dog constantly sniffed the air, the weather was about to change. Crickets chirping inside the house were actually discussing the long winter that was ahead. Rain was expected to come soon whenever dogs ate grass, cats licked their fur or sneezed, or owls hooted in the daytime. A crow flying unusually high meant a windstorm was approaching. It was also said that “onion skin mighty thin, mild winter coming in.”
Besides the number thirteen, spilled salt on the table, and a black cat running across someone’s path, bad luck was sure to come when a hat was laid on a bed, a horse’s name was changed, or wood was burned from a tree that had been struck by lightning. Fortunately, there were also many good-luck omens. Eating black-eyed peas and hog jowl on New Year’s Day assured good luck for the entire year, and horseshoes, four-leaf clovers, and rabbit feet all had their place.
With the Lord Almighty’s guidance and a modicum of good luck, many of the citizens of Akins believed they could make it on their own with little or no help from the outside world. They were from solid pioneer stock and could build a house, shoe a horse, field-dress a deer, make soap, and work a cotton patch or cornfield with the best of them. They mastered the art of building a proper fire in a fireplace, using slow-burning hickory or oak instead of the sticks of apple wood and sassafras that popped and threw sparks or evergreen logs that filled the chimney with oily tar. In the autumn, they made sorghum molasses from the harvested cane and the children ate the skimmings off the syrup pans. The citizens of Akins worked together, and nobody ever even thought about locking the door. In the evenings, they sat on their porches and watched deer come from the creek bottoms to nibble the clover. If there was ever a need to discipline a wayward youngster, parents could cut a huckleberry switch. When someone in the community died, neighbors brought food to the survivors. They washed and dressed the corpse and sat vigil every night until the burial. Afterward, they came back to clean the house and wash the bedclothes. There was a true sense of caring and duty.
Walter Floyd and his bunch took their rightful place in the community just as easy as pie. The Floyds raised almost all of their own food, including sweet and Irish potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, squash, okra, and pumpkins. They picked and canned fruit from apple and peach trees, and kept cows and chickens. They fattened hogs for slaughter after the first hard freeze, cured their own meat, and rendered enough lard to last the whole year. Mamie and her girls washed clothes on rub boards with tubs of water heated in heavy iron kettles. The women also made bars of soap, using meat scraps or melted bacon fat, hot water, and lye. Sometimes the homemade soap contained wood ashes cooked up in a huge pot with the hog lard. One scrubbing with the strong soap each Saturday night was usually enough to keep even the dirtiest farm boy clean for at least a week.
Soon after moving to Akins, the Floyds enjoyed a successful growing season that yielded one bale of cotton per acre. Walter earned some extra income by hiring himself out as a county road worker during the summer and sold moonshine liquor to thirsty big-city Shriners and Masonic brothers. With the additional wages, he saw clear to lease more fertile land for corn and cotton. He also decided to splurge. He purchased the Floyd family’s very first automobile. It was a Ford touring car.
The Floyd youngsters were wild with excitement when Walter drove the shiny black automobile out to Akins and right up to the porch of the family’s new home. Mamie was not quite sure what to think, but if her husband’s extravagance bothered her, she said nothing. Choc and Bradley were far from quiet. They shrieked rebel yells that would have made their ancestors proud. The boys pestered their father until he allowed them supervised turns behind the steering wheel. They drove the Ford down to the creek and washed it so often that Walter was afraid they would wear the paint off. The boys learned how to fine-tune the motor and they fussed over the automobile just as if it were one of their finest horses.
Walter also tried to teach his eldest daughter, Ruth, a seventeen-year-old schoolteacher at the Rocky Point community, how to drive. He felt sorry that she had to walk home every weekend from work. He lost his patience after only one test run, however. She had handled the auto to Walter’s satisfaction on the country roads, but when they returned home and he got out in order to open the gate, there was trouble. Instead of waiting for her father, the nervous Ruth unintentionally mashed her foot on the accelerator. The Ford lurched forward and crashed through the wooden gate like an angry bull. Walter jumped out of the way in the nick of time. As far as he was concerned, Ruth could continue to rely on her feet to get around.
One stormy night not long after the Floyds moved to Akins, Ruth and her sister Ruby found themselves on foot after they had attended a party at a friend’s house and were trying to make it home in a driving rainstorm. Thunder crashed around them and the roads turned into rivers of mud. The only way the young women could see was when long streaks of lightning tore through the black sky. Ruth and Ruby knew better than to seek refuge under one of the swaying trees, but they also realized their chances of being struck by lightning were just as good if they stayed out in the open. Although they were as acquainted with the county’s back roads as well as anyone, the young women were not as familiar with the shortcuts near their new home. The intensity of the storm only made the situation worse.
Family legend had it that suddenly, out of the night, a figure on horseback appeared. It was Charley. There before them was none other than their little brother riding bareback through the torrential rain. His woolen cap was pulled down over his face and he was grasping the horse’s thick mane. Before the girls could cry out, Charley had pulled up the horse next to them.
“Grab hold of the tail,” Charley yelled. “Grab hold of it, and don’t let go for anything!”
Ruth and Ruby did as they were ordered. Both girls clutched the horse’s tail, and Charley led them through the pelting rain down the flooded road. Soon they spied the oil lamps burning in the windows of their home. There on the porch was Mamie in a patched sweater, with a shawl over her head, waiting for her children like a silent angel. It took an hour to clean the mud off the girls’ legs and feet, and to dry their hair. They sat wrapped in quilts before the fire and sipped hot toddies. They told the rest of the family about the dance and how the storm had suddenly descended on them and how scared they were until Charley had appeared like an outlaw ghost. They smiled at Charley, who now sat cross-legged in his long underwear across the room. He smiled back, and then he quickly ducked his head before Bradley and the others could tease him.
By the time he reached his teens, Choc’s school days were coming to a close. Although he was as bright as the next one, Charley Floyd saw no future in going on beyond grammar school. Like most farm youths of his day, he received little or no encouragement to do so from his parents. Six or maybe even eight years of school was enough for any tenant farmer’s child. When a boy reached puberty, the time had come for him to take his place in the world and go to work. Having started his elementary education in Adairsville, Georgia, Choc continued at the Hanson school and finished up with a brief stint at Akins. He believed that high school held no real promise.
Choc’s life work seemed clear. Like his father before him, he would raise corn, cotton, and children. He would run his hounds and make a jug or two of corn whiskey out in the woods. He would go to church and prayer meetings, grow old with his brothers and sisters, and tend to his parents’ needs in their final years. However, this was not his own game plan. He could not say exactly how he would end up as a grown man, but he was already convinced that there was more to life than a mule and a plow. There was plenty to see beyond the Oklahoma backwoods.
Choc was quite determined by the time he reached his thirteenth birthday. He was confident of himself and his ability to get ahead. Everyone around him also knew that he was not someone with whom to trifle. He would never turn down the opportunity to fight for his rights or for something in which he believed. That was especially true if a fellow he was fighting was considered to be a bully. Anybody dumb enough to back Choc Floyd into a corner soon found out what it was like to tangle with a wildcat. The sturdy youngster with muscular arms and shoulders was a pure competitor. He excelled at both team and individual sports. He could pole vault, run footraces, and did well at football, basketball, and baseball. He also wrestled as well as anyone in the county. He also knew how to use his fists.
Choc showed his true grit just before he ended his schooling when three local boys in their late teens approached the schoolhouse in a wagon. The ringleader of the trio had a bellyful of moonshine and was intent on calling on the young woman teacher. He was a mean drunk, and his two friends did their best to keep him from causing a disruption. He was big and strong, though, and they finally went along with him. When the three of them burst through the door, the young woman scolded them in the most stern schoolmarm voice she could muster, but she was about their age. They only laughed and kept coming. Several of the bigger boys from the eighth grade got up and came to her rescue. They wrestled the invaders out the door and a fight commenced. Within minutes, the three rowdies had whipped the schoolboys and run them off. Before they could start to gloat, however, from out of nowhere came a compact cyclone with a Jack Dempsey punch.
It was Choc Floyd, and he was as pissed off as anyone had seen him. His arms were in constant motion and he battled with the measured grace of a contender. Just a few well-placed licks and the scowl on his face were enough to cause the two sober boys to back off and watch with the others. Choc then turned his full attention to the drunk. His fists slammed into the big boy’s nose, mouth, and jaw. Decades later, old men and women could still recall the ugly sound of bone and cartilage cracking as Choc punched and jabbed. Blood and spittle dripped from the drunk’s chin and then Choc drove a fist into his stomach. That ended it. He beat the tough guy senseless in no time flat. When the fellow was lying on his back in the dust, Choc fetched some rope and he bound the big boy like a boar hog for market. With help from the two forlorn accomplices, Choc pitched him headfirst into the back of the wagon. He told the boys to never pull a stunt like that again, and he sent them on their way. It was a classic case of ruffian getting his comeuppance. From that afternoon on, Choc Floyd was a hero for more than one farm youngster.
Choc’s proficiency with his fists allowed him never to leave a challenge unanswered. Even when a large gang of farm toughs attacked him one afternoon in Sallisaw and tried to gouge out one of his eyes, Choc kept fighting despite the stream of blood and the pain. It took an operation to save his eyesight. After one of the town doctors stitched up the boy’s wounds and worked on the injured eyeball, Choc only laughed and talked about how many punches and kicks he had been able to land before the others got the best of him. Word got around that Choc Floyd was not someone to pick on.
Choc became in no time a take-charge type, a natural-born leader. The rest of the boys usually went along with whatever he suggested. Frank “Tickey” Green, Cleon Amos, Aud Farmer, Orphus Franks, and James “Soap” Masterson were some of his closest pals. Together, they were a formidable bunch, filled with mischief and fun. Suntanned and hardheaded, they were intrepid young men.
These were also young men smart in the ways of the woods. When they were just lads, they had learned the hard lessons of life. To make extra money, they trapped opossum and mink for their skins. They listened to the calls of song birds to learn whether someone else was approaching in the forest. They knew how to make a camp fire in the rain, and painful experience taught them that if they did not want to get skunked when they went fishing, they had to get the best bait possible. So they filled tin cans with the fat worms that feasted on the big heart-shaped leaves of the catalpa trees and brought home a mess of crappie and perch. Spitting on the baited hook also brought them good luck. They were wary of hand-fishing, or “noodling,” as it was called, when they waded along the riverbanks and searched for fish to grab by the gills and mouth. They stayed mindful of snakes and sinkholes, and were always aware that the rocks and logs below the murky water could conceal a muskrat or beaver or a snapping turtle. Or there might even be a lunker catfish—big as a small boy—that was never anxious to get yanked from its resting place.
Choc and his friends had a passion for the hunt. In the winter, they would wrap their feet in toe sacks and chase rabbits through the snow and follow opossum by lantern light. They looked forward to shooting matches that sharpened their marksmanship. The best shooters stepped off a hundred yards or more and fired with deadly accuracy at bottles and tin cans or paper targets pinned to fence posts. Their horseback-riding prowess would have pleased Jeb Stuart. They all seemed to know the value of good hunting dogs. Walter had kept hounds all his life and he taught his sons how to care for their dogs and horses and keep them in shape for those long chases after wolves and foxes.
Walter and his boys at one time even owned twenty-eight fine hounds that resided at the Floyd home at Akins. All of them were deep-chested and of single intent. Choc’s favorite hound was named Buck, a streamlined dog with long ears and a sickle-shaped tail. Buck lived for nothing else but hunting and dreamed about stalking wild game and running full tilt through the open fields and river bottoms. Oftentimes the eager hound, as aggressive as his lively master, would get loose and run off with another pack of dogs out on a hunt. Most of the time, the breathless Buck would return to the Floyd place with the fox’s severed paw or tail tied around his neck, which showed that he had sniffed out the quarry before all the others.
Choc liked riding his horse through the woods with old Buck and the other hounds baying far ahead. He also knew the pleasure that came from being alone before sundown under a clump of big trees, with his back against an oak that had grown tall before any white men were around. Sometimes Choc slipped away from the other boys. He went across the fields and into the woods. He watched the birds head for cover as the sun sneaked away and the moon rose. He saw the silhouettes of cattle on the hills. It was good to be there with not another soul to talk to, a time just to listen to the last echoes of the dying day.