Ben Brantley, drama critic of the New York Times, has credited Trevor Nunn’s 1998 production of Oklahoma! with letting us see more clearly the shadows that have always been cast by the “bright golden haze on the meadow.” The interplay between the light and the dark, between exuberant optimism and the threat of violence, lies at the very heart of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical and of the “folk-play” from which it was faithfully adapted, Lynn Riggs’s Green Grow the Lilacs. After the New York opening of Oklahoma! in 1943, Hammerstein publicly acknowledged the heavy debt that he owed to Riggs’s original stage work: “I should like to go on record as saying that Mr. Riggs’s play is the wellspring of almost all that is good in Oklahoma! I kept many of the lines of the original play without making any changes in them at all for the simple reason that they could not be improved on. . . . Lynn Riggs and Green Grow the Lilacs are the very soul of Oklahoma!” Among the Riggs inventions preserved in Oklahoma!’s book and lyrics, though often overlooked by audiences enthralled by Richard Rodgers’s melodious score, is an uncannily prescient delineation of a serial killer. In Green Grow the Lilacs the homicidal farmhand who menaces the peace of a rural community near Tulsa in the Indian Territory during the summer of 1900 is named Jeeter Fry; ever mindful of singability, Hammerstein changed the villain’s first name to Jud. Fry seems to be the supreme embodiment of what Riggs sensed as a potential for evil and calamity that secretly imperiled Oklahoma life during his childhood. Riggs wrote of this feeling of unease: “When I was a child there, the country and the people were very dramatic. A primitive violence was always close to the surface, always apt to break out at any moment. It was all about me. Under a sometimes casual exterior, there was a fever and a thrumming. Just by accident of nerves, I suppose, I was always conscious of this hidden excitement.” The sources of this “hidden excitement,” an emotion that persisted through Riggs’s formative years, may have included the lawless environment of early Oklahoma, a tragic outbreak of racial violence in the region where Riggs grew to manhood, and disasters in his family history.
A Child of Oklahoma’s Outlaw Era
Rollie Lynn Riggs was born on August 31, 1899, on a farm three miles southwest of Claremore in the Tulsa area of the Indian Territory. His father, William, was a rancher at the time of his son’s birth and later became president of a Claremore bank. Lynn’s mother, Rosie, was one-eighth Cherokee and accordingly entitled to an allotment of 160 acres of land under the Dawes Act of 1887; after her death of typhoid fever in 1901, baby Lynn received a portion of her land under his father’s guardianship. In 1902 Bill Riggs married Juliette Chambers, one-fourth Cherokee, who proved cold to his children and served as the prototype of the harsh, cruel stepmothers who appear in Riggs’s work. When Juliette’s anger would boil over, Bill Riggs sent the children to stay with his sister, Mary Riggs Thompson, who provided Lynn “some of the mothering he lacked at home”; Aunt Mary became the loving and wise Aunt Eller of Green Grow the Lilacs.
Succeeding generations remember Lynn Riggs as poet, Southwestern regional dramatist, and writer of scripts for such Hollywood films as The Plainsman, starring Gary Cooper, and the Marlene Dietrich vehicle The Garden of Allah. His early years, however, provided him a generous sampling of ranching and white-collar experience that helped him develop the realist vein that came to predominate in his writing. In 1928 Riggs summarized his life to date in a deprecating postscript when he answered a letter from Barrett H. Clark, of drama publisher and agency Samuel French, Inc., requesting an autobiography: “Would you rather know that I’ve farmed, punched cattle, been night clerk in a small Oklahoma hotel, ridden a freight to Chicago, worked for an express company, played extra in dozens of movies, clerked in Macy’s, read proof for various newspapers, reported, sung all over the middle west one summer in chautauqua, taught English, published poems, worked on a ranch, etc.”
The great range of Riggs’s occupations, many of which would be familiar to young Americans trying their hands at entry-level jobs, should not disguise the fact that he was born into and remained under the spell of Oklahoma’s outlaw era. In 1892, only seven years before Riggs’s birth, the Daltons, after strengthening their gang in Oklahoma, were shot to pieces during a vainglorious robbery of two banks in broad daylight at Coffeyville, Kansas. Dalton gang member Bill Doolin luckily dropped out of the raiding party at the last moment, claiming that his horse had gone lame and that he had to steal a replacement. After the Coffeyville disaster, Doolin organized a new band of desperadoes, the Oklahombres, whom the outlaw’s nemesis, U.S. Marshal Evett Dumas Nix called “the most vicious outlaw gang the Southwest ever was to know.” The Oklahombres eluded a large posse in 1893 after waging a celebrated gunfight at Ingalls, Oklahoma. According to the orthodox version of Doolin lore, Deputy Marshal Heck Thomas shot the outlaw leader to death in 1896 on a dusty road near his hideout in the area of Lawton, Oklahoma.
Tulsa police historian Ronald L. Trekell notes that although the Doolin gang “never plundered or killed in Tulsa, they passed through often.” For Tulsans, and Oklahomans in general, the Doolins enjoy a heroic stature comparable to the preeminence of the James gang in Missouri. Even Marshal Nix, if we are to trust the words of his ghostwriter, Gordon Hines, was lavish in praise of his old adversary, Bill Doolin: “I don’t believe Bill Doolin ever shot a victim in the back and I know very well he didn’t make a practice of robbing needy individuals of their petty all. He and his gang went after organized capital—the railroads, banks and express companies. If he took a horse or forced a lonely rancher to feed his men, it was because of dire necessity and he always tried to compensate the person who was called upon for help.”
Other outlaws flourishing in the last days of the Indian Territory included the part-Cherokee Crawford Goldsby (“Cherokee Bill”), who reputedly killed thirteen victims before his twentieth birthday; and a gang led by a Euchee Indian named Rufus Buck that went on a “ten-day spree of rape, robbery and murder” in 1895. Many of Oklahoma’s desperadoes continued their outrages during Lynn Riggs’s lifetime. The killings by the Bert Casey gang ended only in 1902 when Casey and Jim Sims were shot by special deputies in Cleo Springs. By the standards of his generation, part-Cherokee bank robber and murderer Henry Starr was a champion of criminal longevity; born in 1873, he died of wounds suffered at a failed Arkansas bank robbery in 1921.
The white and Indian outlaws of Oklahoma, transformed by poetic vision, reappear in many of the plays of Lynn Riggs. Sometimes they become comic or heroic figures of frontier myth that symbolize a yearning for freedom from social constraint. At other times, however, the career or habitual criminal is stripped of glamour and embodies the menace and destructive impulse that Riggs felt stirring beneath the soil of his native state.
The 1920 Claremore Fire and the 1928 Sapulpa Shooting
Riggs’s acute sensitivity to disaster likened the ravages of nature to mankind’s cruelty. In Russet Mantle, produced on Broadway in 1936, the poet Galt makes this analogy explicit.
Here we are in a land, vast and beautiful and fertile. Seeds in the earth push up. They blossom, they feed us. Sometimes there’s no rain—last summer there wasn’t—and the soil that ought to bear becomes instead a blowing and drifting terror. . . . The papers call it a drought. Sometimes there are cloudbursts—you have them out here. . . . Sometimes a winter when sleet and snow and wind are slashing and venomous. But what happens? The cold stops. Rains fall. The sun shines. The rigors and terrors of Nature come to an end. But the rigor and terror of man against man never cease. I’ve seen it. I know! In textile mills, railroad yards, on docks, in the streets. Machine guns mowing down men in Wisconsin. Men and women hounded and flogged and tortured in San Francisco. Riot squads, strike breakers, nausea gas—bayonets! And starvation.
Nature’s threats constantly loomed over Riggs’s Oklahoma. Tulsa lies in a tornado alley. The city maintains a siren system to warn of oncoming storm or flood. Although the metropolis had long been spared, a monstrous twister descended nearby in May 1999, causing heavy damage to the Oklahoma City suburbs and the town of Stroud on the turnpike leading to the city. Another danger is posed to Oklahomans in the spring by prairie fires whipped by dry March winds, a far cry from the sweet wind that “comes right behind the rain” in the pages of the Rodgers and Hammerstein anthem.
The fear of fire, whether of natural origin or due to human agency, is a pervasive theme of Green Grow the Lilacs. On inquiry among the playwright’s surviving relatives, I have encountered a recollection that Riggs, about eight years before the play’s composition, had a close brush with a fire of unexplained cause at the home of his beloved aunt, Mary Riggs Thompson. After her second marriage, to John Brice, Aunt Mary had given up the management of a boardinghouse adjoining the St. James Hotel in Claremore and moved to a farmhouse west of the town near the road to Collinsville. About 1920, during the Christmas season, Lynn Riggs paid a visit to Aunt Mary; others staying at the house were his first cousin Willie Thompson (the original Ado Annie), his eight-year-old first cousin (once removed) Howard McNeill (whose mother, Laura, inspired the character of Laurey), and Howard’s three-year-old sister, Mary Jane. As Mr. McNeill, now deceased, recalled in a 2002 telephone conversation with me, when he was over ninety, “Uncle” Lynn left for the Claremore train station around midnight on Christmas Eve. In the course of the night a fire broke out. A wall of the farmhouse collapsed in flames; the family’s dogs barked, alerting the household. Howard escaped and was relieved to see his grandmother carry little Mary Jane to safety. To the day Howard spoke with me, he could not account for the fire but noted that both Lynn and Aunt Willie were smokers.
It is tempting to speculate whether the Claremore fire may have remained in Lynn Riggs’s mind when he brought Green Grow the Lilacs to its climax with the attempted torching of the Williams farm before the horrified eyes of Laurey and Aunt Eller. There is no doubt, however, that a violent family tragedy in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, dating from 1928, the year before Green Grow the Lilacs was written, haunted the dramatist during the rest of his life.
On Easter Sunday, April 8, 1928, Bessie Thompson was arrested in the fatal shooting at two o’clock that morning of her husband, Raymond, Riggs’s first cousin. Raymond was “shot twice through the left side, one bullet going through his arm also. He lived a few minutes after he was shot, but was unable to speak.” The tragedy occurred at a rooming house called the Midway Rooms, where the Thompson couple resided; the establishment was operated by Ray’s sister, Dollie (Mrs. Arthur R. Woods). Dollie told the police that Bessie “turned the gun on herself as she entered [the Thompsons’] room, shooting twice through her left breast”; doctors found only superficial flesh wounds. The arresting officers found Bessie in a bloody night dress standing over her husband. When a physician told her that he was dying, she bent down to Ray for a last kiss. Her request to attend his funeral was denied, but she was permitted to help relatives select a casket.
Raymond, age forty-two, was nine years younger than Bessie; they had no children. He had been employed by the Frisco (St. Louis & San Francisco) Railroad until eye trouble forced him to change jobs. At her trial the following month, Bessie testified, in the support of her defenses of self-defense and temporary insanity, that she was afraid that Ray, to whom she had been wed sixteen years before, would kill her. At a party they attended on the evening before the shooting, Ray had danced with a young woman, Bessie calmly told the jury with an occasional tear; he had then attempted unsuccessfully to leave the party without his encumbering wife. After they reached home, he cursed Bessie as a spoilsport, grabbed and bruised her, and locked her out of their bedroom. When she broke the latch, he went for a .38 caliber revolver lying in the tray of a trunk, but she seized it first and fired twice. She then turned the gun on herself. She had only a “hazy memory” of what happened afterward.
On May 23, after a brief nocturnal deliberation, the jury acquitted Bessie Thompson, setting her free only about a month and a half after the homicide. The county court seemed to show great tenderness for criminal defendants that year. In its issue of May 24, 1928, the Sapulpa Herald set the Thompson acquittal in context: “This case was the last one tried on the criminal term of court which opened here May 15. Only two convictions were returned during the term. In both cases, the charge was burglary.”
Raymond Thompson’s sixteen-year-old nephew, Howard McNeill, who had witnessed the Claremore fire, was staying at his Aunt Dollie’s rooming house on the fatal Easter morning. He had never seen a corpse before, and he never forgot the horrifying image of Raymond’s staring eyes. Unsurprisingly, McNeill and his relatives do not concur with the jury’s speedy verdict. According to McNeill, Ray’s sisters never much cared for their sister-in-law Bessie, whom they regarded as “domineering.” The Thompsons believed that Bessie had shot her husband because he was planning to leave her. Family loyalties became entangled in the aftermath of the shooting, because Charley Warner, the husband of Ray’s sister Lillie, was Bessie’s nephew. McNeill recalls that arguments over the trial brought the Warners to the brink of divorce.
From March 1953 until shortly before his death of cancer in June 1954, Lynn Riggs was working intensively on the adaptation of the Sapulpa murder case in a novel to be entitled “The Affair at Easter.” His plans for the book, of which three of five projected parts were completed, signaled an intention to universalize the significance of his family’s tragedy by sounding his often reiterated theme of ever-present human cruelties patterned on the harshness of nature. The very first words of the typescript, as it has been left to us, starkly announce, “Loose in the world is a floating malice.” A preliminary entry in his working notebook raises the possibility of concluding each of the novel’s sections—“Easter Morning,” “Georgia’s My Home,” “Hide Me from Heaven,” “Summer Solstice,” and “Truth to Tell”—with actual or impending violence. In the epigraphs of the novel’s sections, Riggs preannounces an analogy between human brutality and nature’s rages by adopting successive phrases drawn from the only surviving stanza of an unfinished poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins:
Strike, churl; hurl, cheerless wind, then; heltering hail
May’s beauty massacre and wispèd wild clouds grow
Out on the giant air; tell Summer No,
Bid joy back, have at the harvest, keep Hope pale.
Structuring his novel (possibly as an “allegory” or “parable”) within this scheme of universal unease, Riggs at the same time followed his customary bent for identifying his characters and settings with people and places he knew well. On March 14, 1953, the first day of entries in his working notebook, he addressed the need to “get the names settled” and to “get the characters straight at once.” The principal figures in the novel and their real-life equivalents included:
| Fictional character | Based on |
| Della (Jonson) Hogan, proprietor of Royal Hotel, Siloam, first wife of Wade Hogan | Margie May “Dollie” Thompson (Mrs. Art Woods), operator of Midway Rooms, Sapulpa |
| Marnen Glory Hogan, Della’s sister, second wife of Wade Hogan | Willie Roberta Thompson, married to Art Woods about 1935 after the death of her sister Dollie; Willie Thompson inspired Ado Annie in Green Grow the Lilacs |
| Rod Jonson, husband and shooting victim of his wife, Beth; brother of Della and Marnen Glory | Ray Thompson, shot by his wife, Bessie, in Sapulpa in 1928 |
| Beth Jonson | Bessie Thompson |
| Wade Hogan | Art Woods |
| Caleb White, “stepfather” of the Jonson siblings but perhaps bigamously married to their mother, Emma, deceased | A man identified by Riggs only as John B., probably John Brice, Mary Riggs Thompson’s second husband; like White, Brice was an itinerant worker |
The author’s personal resemblances to certain of the novel’s characters grew more complex as his plotting developed. The second entry in his working notebook suggested that Beth’s recital of her version of the shooting might be made “to me—or someone like me—in the cell.” In the initial table of characters, the role of the prisoner’s confidant is Rod Jonson’s cousin, Professor Andrew Tabor. Andy’s identification with Lynn Riggs is confirmed in the table of the characters’ real-life correspondences where Riggs’s name is abbreviated by the initials R.L. (i.e., Rollie Lynn, the author’s first names). The same initials also identify the playwright as the source for the professor’s son, the college student Brad Tabor, who was to play a crucial role in the novel’s plot.
Riggs’s initial idea, which he compared to that of the celebrated 1950 Japanese film Rashomon, was to have different people telling the major story of the “killing of Ray” but in doing so to “tell richly . . . character and a time.” To all appearances, he was more successful in creating characters than in evoking the period of the action: although Riggs alternatively considered setting the novel’s principal events either in 1940, twelve years after the Sapulpa murder, or in the present, 1953, he did not create a social ambience that is sufficiently detailed to reflect convincingly the era of World War II or its aftermath.
In the three completed sections of his novel, Riggs adhered to his plan of utilizing multiple points of view, but the extensive use of flashbacks sometimes weakens the focus on varying interpretations of the Easter shooting. As the story begins, Beth Jonson, who has been convicted of Rod’s murder, writes to Andy Tabor complaining of the family’s false testimony, asking him to hear her side of the story and asserting that the shooting was accidental or, at worst, in self-defense. In a postscript Beth darkly hints, “Besides—you’re more tied up in this thing than maybe you know. I wouldn’t want to do anything about that, though. Nuff Sed.” The direction of the implied threat will eventually be made plain, but the postscript immediately shows one of the main reasons that, even apart from the killing, the Jonson family detests Beth: she is an inveterate snoop and eavesdropper who is often right about her in-laws’ conduct but consistently misreads their motives. As the novel proceeds, Riggs reveals many crimes and scandals within the Jonson family that richly merited Beth’s prying: Caleb White’s possible guilt of bigamy and murder; the operation of a bootlegging and gambling joint by Wade Hogan and his second wife, Marnen Glory; the irresponsible Marnen Glory’s conception of her daughter Inez with Wade while he was still married to Della; Inez’s brutal deflowering by her parents’ poker dealer and her affair with Suggs Aker, a married country ballad singer modeled on Gene Autry.
Part One is given over mostly to a narrative, told mainly from Beth’s point of view, of the events on Easter morning that culminate in the fatal shooting. The underlying cause of the killing is the years-long marital discord between Rod and the chronically unfaithful Beth. A bitter quarrel is sparked by Rod’s discovering in Room 2 of the hotel a green tie with polka dots that he had given to his Uncle Walt, with whom Beth has been having an affair; Beth spent the previous night with her lover, who had registered at the Royal Hotel under a fictitious name. (In her reveries she refers to him only as “Mr. Big and Beautiful.”) As the spouses’ angry words intensify, he caps the quarrel by taunting her, “I don’t even care if you laid up with your own daddy—which I have no doubt you did, from the age of ten on!” She hurls a heavy hairbrush at him; she calls his deceased mother, Emma, not much better than a “very ordinary whore” for marrying Caleb White while his first wife was still alive. Rod goes for a gun and is shot as Beth struggles to wrest it away. As he flees down the rickety backstairs of the hotel and she stands on the platform above, the “gun she had been clutching all this time suddenly exploded with a horrible sound right in her hand.” She passes out as her mortally wounded husband falls into the bushes below.
At the beginning of Part Two (“Georgia’s My Home”), which recounts the immediate aftermath of the killing, Della proves herself to be Beth’s deadliest antagonist. Ranting that “hangin’s too good” for her, she presses Caleb White to give false testimony against her sister-in-law. She reminds her stepfather that he is a fugitive from justice because, as her mother had told her, he had slain his first spouse’s lover, Blaise Hyatt, in North Carolina. In the long flashback that follows, it turns out that Caleb killed his rival in self-defense, but Della has adeptly played on his fear of prosecution and on his irrational belief that stern justice for Beth’s crime will compensate for his own escape from the law.
In Part Three of “The Affair at Easter” (“Hide Me from Heaven”), Della plays another trick to support her assertion that she had seen Beth fire the second bullet after taking careful aim. In fact, Della had not observed the fatal shot. After Rod’s death, however, she scraped away a patch of the black paint that covered the surface of a window in her hotel room; only by means of this covert alteration was the backstairs platform rendered visible from Della’s room, where she had claimed to be at the time of the shooting.
Only a little more than two pages of projected Part Four (“Summer Solstice”) were written, but they are sufficient to disclose the secret to which Beth alluded in her letter to Andy Tabor that begins the book. The small fragment of “Summer Solstice” recalls, from Brad Tabor’s point of view, the beginning of his homosexual passion for Jere Sayville, the young desk clerk of the Royal Hotel whom Brad meets at Rod Jonson’s funeral. Riggs’s working notebook indicates that Jere is in the clutches of a wealthy and possibly corrupt married couple, the Carters, but that he is trying to put his life in order. The theme of homosexuality, previously signaled in Riggs’s notes, took on increasing autobiographical significance as drafts of the novel progressed. In a handwritten reminder on a leaf of his personalized memorandum paper, Riggs elaborated his personal identification with certain of the characters. Moi (me), he wrote, boldly underlined, at the head of the sheet and then listed
Rod (in the branch) [a stream on Uncle Walt’s farm that figures in a happy childhood scene recalled by Rod Jonson in a dream before he wakes to be killed]
Brad & Jere (interchangeably)
Caleb (as young, as old)
Andy.
Riggs’s recognition of two homosexual lovers as his “interchangeable” alter egos is remarkable given the reticence he showed about his personal life. According to Riggs’s plans, Andy Tabor was to learn of his son’s sexual attachment and to respond with love and understanding.
The concluding Part Five (“Truth to Tell”) remains largely a matter for speculation. Riggs’s notes indicate that the section would focus on the interviews Andy Tabor conducted with the Jonson family in an effort to determine the facts of the Easter killing, an investigation that would result in his having greater knowledge of the case than any of the witnesses. In the final scene he would visit Beth in prison and, despite his doubts about the fairness of the trial, would decide to keep silent, after agonizing over the possibility that this course had been influenced by a desire to protect his son and himself. This finale, apparently elaborated from an earlier version of the prison scene intended to be included in Part One, was explained by Riggs in handwritten notes: “Even if they [the witnesses] felt like exerting themselves for Beth, what could they establish? It could only come to their opinion, their guess actually against the firm Gibraltar of Della’s statement of what she had seen.” Andy’s last words, as Riggs left them to us, also favor inaction: “. . . let him be silent. ‘God is often so,’ he assured himself. If in his own experience, it had fallen to him to watch himself acting in such an exalted capacity, he believed quite genuinely, at last it was not for himself only. It was for them, all those who had been involved. Surely he owed them that much comprehension, that much, in an abstract way, love. Even himself.”
The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921
Lynn Riggs’s homeland has been bloodied by tribal and racial conflict in the last two centuries. His native town is situated six miles southeast of a twenty-five-acre mound settled by Osage Indians in 1802 at the encouragement of Major Jean-Pierre Chouteau, founder of St. Louis and Kansas City. The mound was named by the French “fair mountain,” or “Clermont” (later misspelled “Claremore”). After the Cherokees, displaced from the east, were given title to lands including Claremore Mound, they attempted for years to drive the Osages away, and they succeeded only too well. “Claremore’s Historical Summary” recalls the destruction of the Osage community in the so-called Claremore Mound Massacre: “In October 1817, a well-armed band of Cherokee and Delaware Indians attacked the Clermont village. The Osage warriors were away on a hunting trip. The village was filled with women, children and old men. During the attack, many of the Osage Indians got as far as the river, but drowned in an attempt to escape. The others were killed and some taken as prisoners. Chief Clermont [the Osage leader] was killed and buried on the mound.”
Antagonisms between whites and blacks of Oklahoma have also erupted with tragic results. Arrell Morgan Gibson, in his history of the state, has noted that “a Negro-white outbreak . . . occurred in Guthrie during territorial days.” This early conflict has been eclipsed by the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, whose horrors have only been fully recognized in recent years. The violent confrontation of Tulsa’s black and white communities, one of the deadliest racial clashes in American history, was sparked by a minor incident. On May 30, 1921, an African American shoeshine boy, Dick Rowland, had, probably by accident, fallen against a white female acquaintance, seventeen-year-old Sarah Page, who was operating an elevator in downtown Tulsa’s Drexel Building. After Sarah claimed that she had been assaulted, Rowland was jailed, and the headline of the Tulsa Tribune predicted that a mob would “lynch Negro tonight.” Shooting broke out between white and black mobs around the courthouse where Rowland was detained in a well-guarded cell and spread through the downtown area. Early on the following morning, a white army invaded the black Greenwood neighborhood, whose prosperous business district was known as “the Negro Wall Street.” Supported by strafing civil aircraft, the invaders put Greenwood to the torch and murdered and looted as they advanced. It is estimated that up to 300 Tulsans lost their lives on both sides of the racial divide, and thirty-four square blocks of Greenwood were reduced to rubble. This shameful massacre fell out of the consciousness of most Oklahomans until the 1971 publication of a fearless exposé by reporter Ed Wheeler. In February 2001 the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921 delivered its report recommending that reparations be paid to survivors and their descendants. Four months later, Governor Frank Keating signed into law the Tulsa Race Riot Reconciliation Act establishing a memorial and providing scholarships favoring descendants of 1921 Greenwood residents.
Although Lynn Riggs did not explicitly address the Tulsa race riot in his literary works, it is a fair assumption that he had a deep aversion to the persecution of minorities. Riggs’s nephew, Leo Cundiff, now deceased, believed that, because of his Cherokee origin, his uncle sympathized with minority groups, including African Americans. His plays often present with disapproval the mistreatment accorded disfavored minorities, including a German American groundlessly suspected of sabotage during World War II; a Portuguese woman who fears her testimony would not be believed; Mayans despised by descendants of conquistadores in Mexico; a Mexican hazed in an American military school; and a Syrian peddler who an Oklahoman widow fears might beat her daughter daily if he married her.
Two of Riggs’s portrayals of racist hatred directed against blacks appear to conjure ghosts of the Tulsa riot. The cast of characters in Hang on to Love includes Jasper, who, like Dick Rowland, is an African American bootblack. A gambler and small-town bully, Charley Troglin, “didn’t seem to like the way Jasper shined his shoes” and “knocked him clean through the window.” When Troglin saunters into the domino parlor, where Dr. Beeman is treating Jasper’s injuries, he asks the proprietor Jude Summers what is going on. Jude responds coolly, “Doc Beeman is fixing up a negro somebody forgot was human.” The brutal Troglin can think of only one possible explanation for such colorblind sympathy: “From the north, ain’t you?” Later in the first act, Jude calls on a memory “deep inside himself”: “You’ve never seen a man hanged, have you? You’ve never seen him jerking against the wall away up there, and kicking, have you? And they let him down and put him in a basket and take him away.” Thomas Erhard has argued that this passage “reflects Riggs’s horror at the old-time lynchings”; this was a fate that Dick Rowland was spared only because of the vigilance of Sheriff William McCullough, one of the few heroes among the Tulsa authorities.
Riggs revisits the theme of African Americans’ marginalization in one of his major plays, The Cherokee Night (1930). In Scene 4, set in 1906 in the woods near Claremore, three boys of mixed Cherokee and Anglo blood come upon the traces of a murder among four card-playing black men. Art, one of the youths, speaks contemptuously of blacks and of an earlier occasion when they were expelled from Claremore: “Niggers is funny. They got a funny way. When the niggers was run out of Claremore, Pap said a funny thing. When a nigger would git shot, he wouldn’t know it. He’d keep on runnin’.” In precisely such a self-congratulatory spirit, Greenwood’s invaders bragged of their exploits after the infamous burning of 1921. Leo Cundiff remembered that years after the riot an “old boy” came into the Tulsa-area bank where Leo served as a teller and boasted that he had machine-gunned black people along the railroad track, driving them toward Muskogee.
In his earliest attempt at writing full-length drama, Big Lake, written in 1925 and produced by the American Laboratory Theatre two years later with a cast including Stella Adler as Elly, Lynn Riggs established what were to become recurrent features of his stage works: insistence on setting the staged events with great precision in time and community as well as strong interest in presenting violent or lawless conduct. The play is set at the Big Lake, near Verdigree (Verdigris) Switch, Indian Territory, in 1906. Big Lake, located about thirteen miles southwest of Claremore, is a natural body of water over which Cherokees and Osages quarreled. The Department of the Interior resolved the dispute by declaring the area government property and in the 1920s put the Big Lake district up for sale, after which it was privately developed as a gated community. The Binghams, who are mentioned in the course of the play, were actual property owners on Big Lake. The activity of bootleggers that is central in the play’s plot is also well-founded. Prohibition of intoxicants was required in the Indian Territory and Osage Nation for a period of twenty-one years by the Enabling Act authorizing Oklahoma statehood and was extended to the entire state in response to lobbying by dry groups; bootlegging had already been rampant in the nineteenth century.
The tragedy of Big Lake centers on a pair of “very young” schoolmates, Betty and Lloyd, who have fallen in love. They both feel oppressed by their home environments and aspire to escape to freedom. In the symbolic structure of the work, the young couple’s sense of captivity and danger is embodied in the woods, and their hopes of liberation are represented by the lake. Their dreams end bitterly when they learn that there is no refuge for them and that the lake is the shining face of death.
Part One (“The Woods”) shows Betty and Lloyd in the woods bordering Big Lake. Hoping to admire the dawn together, they have arrived ahead of their classmates, who are to be led there by their teacher, Miss Meredith, for a school outing. Both of them, as if a modern Hansel and Gretel, are afraid of the woods, which Betty calls dark and “waitin’.” Lloyd persuades her to go out on the lake with him if they can borrow a boat from a cabin nearby.
The scene shifts to the interior of the cabin. The bootlegger Butch Adams enters quickly and tells his companion Elly that he is being followed by the sheriff. Elly, who assumes that it is moonshining that has got him in trouble, becomes the first of Riggs’s characters to praise lawlessness as a creed of freedom from societal oppression: “You ain’t done nuthin’ wrong. It’s jist a law. W’at the hell’s a law? W’at’s it good fer? Why’n’t it agin the law everwhur else to sell whiskey? Them men whur they have their corner saloons all polished up—a-makin’ it criminal to sell a man a drink—w’at’s right about it? . . . Oh, yes! I know. Pertectin’ the Indians! They don’t want the Indians to git all lit up like they do all the time—ever day, ever night, regular. . . . Hell! Indians! I ain’t saw two Indians since I come to Indian Territory.”
Butch’s problem, though, is much more serious. He is being hunted as the killer of Jim Dory, who had told federal officers at Tulsa about Butch’s whiskey dealings. Butch knew that the informer was planning to go to a party at the Binghams and stabbed him to death after ambushing him in the big woods close to a sawmill. Dory did not die immediately, and Butch feared that he would identify him as the assailant. He tried to “finish the job,” but someone carried the mortally wounded Dory into a store.
When Lloyd and Betty arrive at the cabin, Butch agrees to lend them his boat. Elly’s thoughts are in conflict. She has begun to ponder the feasibility of blaming Butch’s crime on Lloyd but is torn by the boy’s resemblance to her demented brother who drowned in the Big Lake the month before. After their unexpected guests leave, Elly repents her initial thought of inculpating them for Dory’s murder, but Butch takes up the idea in earnest. When the sheriff and his deputies arrive, Butch takes a cue from Elly’s family tragedy; he tells the lawmen that the killer is his crazy brother who “runs wild here in the woods.”
In Scene 1 of Part Two (“The Lake”), the school picnic is in full swing. The censorious schoolmarm criticizes the girls for letting their dancing partners swing them by the waist instead of by the arms and questions Lloyd and Betty closely about their early arrival. Betty and Lloyd row out onto the lake to escape her scolding.
In the concluding Scene 2 the sheriff, mistaking Lloyd for Butch’s fictitious wild brother, shoots him dead from the shore, and Betty drowns herself. Butch, in a sudden change of heart, admits his guilt, Miss Meredith is reduced to tears over the loss of her “poor little ones,” and Elly slowly intones a determinist lament: “It’s always the way. People will go on the lake. Young people. Cain’t keep ’em off. ’N’ they’s alwys accidents. Sometimes it’s the lake, sometimes it’s the woods—boats leak, guns go off, people air keerless, they’s wild animals—sump’n happens, sump’n alwys happens. It cain’t be helped.”
The murder in Big Lake and the two tragic deaths that follow in the play’s last scene do not appear to be based on actual incidents, but the circumstances of Butch’s crime are true to experience in the Indian Territory toward the end of the nineteenth century. A pertinent example is the triple 1897 murder near Rose, Oklahoma, about fifty miles east of Tulsa. Known as the Saline Courthouse Massacre, this case has many of the ingredients of Riggs’s plot: bootlegging activity in the area, murder from ambush, the killing of a would-be informer, and the possibility that the first of the three crimes was staged in a way that would cast suspicion on an innocent man.
Professional criminals also appear in Riggs’s 1928 drama The Domino Parlor (which was later revised as Hang on to Love). In 1928 a man who calls himself Jude Summers has for three years been running the Mission Club, a domino parlor in Blackmore, a blending of the names of two Oklahoma towns, Blackwell and Claremore. In 1916, under the name Jack Carpenter, Jude was involved in a bank robbery in Wilmington, Delaware, in which a cashier was killed. Jude seems to have chosen the perfect hideout, because Blackmore’s chief of police, Braden, who winks at the whiskey that the Mission Club illegally mixes with its soft drinks, openly admits that car stealing is more in his law enforcement line than murder.
Jude’s past, however, returns to Blackmore in the person of Toni Devereaux, who is the star of a wretched musical revue (“tab show”) featuring the “Dizzy Red Hots, Mostly Girls,” performing at the Lyric Theatre. Toni inadvertently reveals Jude’s identity to Charley Troglin, a brutal gambler who has served a term in the penitentiary for murder. When Troglin arranges to inform Chief Braden of his discovery, Toni shoots the gambler in an alley.
In A Lantern to See By, an eruption of violence is closely related to what novelist Henry Roth defined as the central theme of Riggs’s plays, “the conflict between the impulses of the individual and the constricting forces about him, whether they be the demands of other individuals or the organized demands of society.” In the play, set in a farmhouse near Blackmore, John Harmon, a brutal drunkard, tyrannizes his six sons, reserving the most vicious abuse for ninteen-year-old Jodie, whom he attacked with an iron pinch bar offstage in the first scene. John drives his wife, Thursey, to an early death from overwork as well as from the frequent childbirths that he publicly vaunts as evidence of his potency. Young Annie Marble is hired to take over the domestic chores. Jodie falls in love with her. He is shocked to learn, however, that his father has misappropriated wages due him from a job away from the farm as a teamster and that during his absence from home Annie has become his father’s mistress. Jodie vents his accumulated grievances against his father at a confrontation in the farm smokehouse and kills him with the pinch bar that John has thrown at him. Annie is furious with Jodie for cutting off the payments she feels sure that the old man, had he lived, would have made for her sexual favors; she was counting on the cash to finance her joining “Ruby Dawson an’ some other girls” in “a house—fer men to come to.”
Murder is prominent among the social ills of Oklahoma’s Cherokees as depicted in The Cherokee Night. The episodes of the work move backward and forward in time, the earliest date being 1895 (Scene 7) and the latest 1931 (Scene 3). Each scene is dominated by the profile of Claremore Mound. The ambiguity of that event in Oklahoma historiography, which alternatively describes it as a “battle” or, more realistically, as “a massacre,” is reflected in Scene 1 (“Sixty-seven Arrowheads”), set at the mound in 1915. Three young couples, all part Cherokee, encounter an old man, Talbert, who is digging for arrowheads on the mound as an offering to “all the Cherokees,” who he believes have lost their birthright since their victory on the mound and have passed into night because, as a warrior apparition has taught him, they have “sunk already to the white man’s way.” The young people do not all share the old man’s fervor, and a schoolteacher, Viney Jones, remembers the Osage sorrow as well as the Cherokees’ past glory: “The killing was godawful. And only one woman of the Osage camp got away. Clumb down yand’ side of the Mound, swum the river and was never heard of again.” Many of the remaining scenes show that white hostility, and the assimilating Indians’ self-hatred, have incited new instances of violence and hostility among the Cherokees. A prostitute, Bee Newcomb, is planted in jail to induce mixed-blood Art Osburn’s confession to killing his wife, an older Indian woman, Clara Leahy, with a “leathery old face, them eyes all bloodshot, her stringy hair” (Scene 2); a group of part-Cherokee youths show little sympathy when they discover evidence of a murder among blacks (Scene 4); and Gar Breeden, a young man disillusioned with the Cherokee community, faces torture and death at the hands of a Bible-thumping cult (Scene 5). In Scene 7, set in 1895, a peaceful full-blood Cherokee, Gray-Wolf, witnesses a posse’s murder of a half-white outlaw, Edgar Breeden (Gar Breeden’s father), who was, says Gray-Wolf, “not enough Indian” to forgo a life of crime. Lawman Tinsley crows to Gray-Wolf, “Tell ever’body what it means to oppose the law. You Indians must think you own things out here. This is God’s country out here—and God’s a white man. Don’t forget that.”
Two plays by Lynn Riggs, both thematically related to Green Grow the Lilacs, treat crime and rebelliousness in a comic spirit. In the one-act Knives from Syria, produced by the Santa Fe Players in 1925, a Syrian peddler is able to run off with a farm girl, Rhodie, because the hired man, Charley, who woos her with her widowed mother’s blessing, believes that he is pursued by killers. Actually, Charley is the victim of a prank. Roadside (1930)—expanded from an original one-act version, Reckless—features a high-spirited cowboy yarn spinner named Texas (played by Ralph Bellamy in the 1930 New York run) who, when arraigned for intoxication, kicked the judge off the bench, made a hash of the courthouse, and breaks out of jail. Unlike Curly, who is domesticated by Laurey at the end of Green Grow the Lilacs, Texas chooses a life on the move with the spunky teenager who has won his heart, Hannie. In a program for the 1941 production at Baylor University, Riggs described Roadside as “a comedy about the impossible dream man has always had: complete freedom, the right to be lawless, uncircumspect, gusty and hearty, anarchic, fun loving, chicken stealing if necessary (for where there is no ordinary morality, there is of course no crime).”
The Quest for “Pore Jud”
Lynn Riggs completed Green Grow the Lilacs in 1929 during a stay in France financed by a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. The play is set near Claremore in 1900, seven years before Oklahoma’s admission to the Union. Riggs included nineteenth-century songs and ballads in the work, intending “solely to recapture in a kind of nostalgic glow (but in dramatic dialogue more than in song) the great range of mood which characterized the old folk songs and ballads I used to hear in my Oklahoma childhood—their quaintness, their sadness, their robustness, their simplicity, their hearty or bawdy humors, their sentimentalities, their melodrama, their touching sweetness.”
On November 27, 1947, Riggs answered an inquiry of Marion Starr Mumford of Claremore about the biographical origins of his characters in Green Grow the Lilacs. He responded: “Aunt Eller is based on my wonderful Aunt Mary—(Mrs. John Brice)—and some of the things I vaguely knew about my mother—who died when I was two—(Her name, too, was Ella. “Eller,” as people called her). . . . Laurey was my cousin Laura Thompson, who died some time ago. She was glowing and lovely—and made a deep and tender and lasting impression on me. Curly was a cowboy who used to work for my aunt.” The letter is silent about the real-life basis of the play’s villain, Jeeter Fry, but Riggs’s relatives and friends have identified him as a farmhand named Jetar (sometimes misspelled Jeeter) Davis. Only occasionally is Davis remembered as sharing any of Jeeter Fry’s repellent traits. Biographer Phyllis Cole Braunlich writes that “Jeeter, in fact, was known as one of the meanest boys in town.” An article in the Rogers County Historical Society Newsletter of March/May 1999 asserts that Jeeter Fry was in reality “a man named Jeeter Davis who pulled a knife on a family member.”
In 1998 Howard McNeill gave the Chanute (Kansas) Tribune’s managing editor Stu Butcher a far less disturbing version of Davis’s character: “His name was Jeeter Davis and I remember him just like it was yesterday. He was a farmhand, but one of these guys who would get drunk on Saturday and thought he was a whiz with the women and . . . he was just a dirty old boy.” By far the greatest repository of knowledge of Jetar Davis (including the correct spelling of his first name) lay in the prodigious memory of Lynn Riggs’s nephew, Leo Cundiff, who responded by email on April 1, 2002, to my inquiry about Davis. “All that I have heard about [Jetar] Davis was that he was sort of the town drunk,” Cundiff wrote. “Several of the townspeople would make fun of him and play jokes on him. I am told that he was not a threat to anyone except himself. He used to carry mortar for a brick mason and when a carnival would come to town, he would oblige one of their performers by wrestling with him. I am told he was pretty good.”
Cundiff was able to supply other biographical details about Jetar Davis that may be crucial to understanding Davis’s transformation into Riggs’s Jeeter Fry and later into Jud Fry (“Pore Jud”) in Oklahoma! Jetar was a close contemporary of Lynn Riggs; he was born in Claremore on August 9, 1899 (a few weeks before Riggs), and died in 1958. Moreover, like Riggs, Jetar had Cherokee blood.
In Scene 1 of Green Grow the Lilacs, Curly McClain refers to Jeeter Fry, the hired hand on Laurey Williams’s farm, as “that bullet-colored growly man ’th the bushy eyebrows,” and the introductory stage directions of Scene 3, set in the farm’s smokehouse, describe Jeeter as having “a curious earth-colored face and hairy hands.” Without the benefit of Leo Cundiff’s biographical revelations, Roger Aikin intuitively reaches a sound conclusion that knowledge of the real-life Jetar Davis fortifies: Jeeter Fry is the cowboy hero Curly’s “dark side.” From this promising beginning of his argument, however, Aikin proceeds to a dubious conclusion, that Fry can be best understood as the son of parents who “came from the wrong part of Europe, perhaps in that great immigrant wave after 1880.” It is more plausible that the character of Jeeter Fry, and his dark color, reflect the Cherokee in Lynn Riggs and the dramatist’s painful sense of the devaluation of Cherokees in American life.
In Green Grow the Lilacs, Jeeter Fry’s low self-esteem accounts for much of his unlovely conduct that makes his young employer, Laurey Williams, afraid of him, although he is essential to the operation of her farm. In Scene 2 Laurey tells Aunt Eller that she hooks her door at night and fastens her windows because she hears the sound of feet walking around the corner of the house and in the front room and wakes to hear boards creaking. Fry holes up in the smokehouse, feeding his sexual fantasies on pink covers from the Police Gazette and pornographic postcards that he buys from a peddler. Laurey feels constrained to accept his invitation to an evening of square dances, songs, and games (“play-party”), but when he makes unwanted advances to her outside their host’s house, she fires him. He accuses her of regarding herself as “so goddamned much better” and threatens revenge.
Fry’s menaces terrify Laurey because she is obsessed with the dangers of fire and arson. In Scene 2, when she had confided her fears of Jeeter to her aunt, she told Eller that as a child she had seen a farmhouse ablaze as she rode in a covered wagon with her parents on her way to Claremore. The farmer’s wife sat at the roadside and lamented, “Now my home’s burnt up. ’F I’d jist a-give him a piece of cold pork or sump’n. If I’d jist a-fed him!” The young Laurey had understood the woman to blame a resentful itinerant for setting the fire, and this traumatic memory led her to worry persistently about the risk that Jeeter would torch the Williams farm. This concern was stirred to panic by Jeeter’s angry words after his discharge.
The violent resolution of the play’s amorous triangle in Scene 5 demonstrates that, despite the effort of Aunt Eller to calm her fears, Laurey was right to be nervous. After her wedding to Curly, Jeeter Fry attempts to torch the haystack that the newlyweds are forced to mount by their boisterous neighbors. The couple is saved, and Fry is killed during a scuffle with Curly when he falls on his own knife.
Jeeter Fry’s murderous designs against Laurey and her cowboy had been far from unprecedented. When in Scene 3 Curly McClain pays a visit to Fry in his smokehouse lair, he learns more about the farmhand than even Laurey suspects in her recurrent premonitions: he is a serial murderer. Riggs’s study of Jeeter’s large-scale homicidal mania is eerily predictive of a phenomenon of which most Americans were only dimly aware before 1966, when Charles Whitman’s sniper shots from a tower on the campus of the University of Texas killed fifteen and wounded thirty random victims. Curly shows considerable detective-like skill in worming a veiled confession from the reclusive, fantasy-ridden Jeeter, who resents employers and others he believes regard themselves as his “betters.” His tongue loosened by Curly’s singing of the hanging ballad of Sam Hall, Jeeter (who shares the compulsion of many serial killers to avow or describe their crimes) narrates two separate outrages that he attributes to unnamed murderers:
A farm girl’s suitor came upon her in the barn loft with another man. One morning her father found his daughter in a horse trough, “in her nightgown, layin’ there in the water all covered with blood, dead.” The killer probably threw her in the trough because “he couldn’t stand havin’ blood on him.”
A married farmer was carrying on a passionate affair with a girl. When she told him that she was pregnant, he bound her hands and feet, threw her on top of a haystack and set fire to it. “He didn’t keer about her goin’ to have the baby, that wasn’t it. He jist didn’t know how he was goin’ to live ’thout havin’ her all the time while she was carryin’ it. So he killed her.”
Even these two killings do not necessarily exhaust Fry’s catalog of horror. He also tells Curly of previous employers near Quapaw, and before that near Tulsa, who were “bastards to work fer, both of ’em, . . . alwys makin’ out they were better.” Curly, alerted by Jeeter’s murder narratives, asks whether he had got even, but the hired man abruptly breaks off his disclosures. It is too late for silence, though. Curly has already heard enough for his cowboy heart to despise the hired hand as a “festering” loner hiding from the sunlight: “In this country, they’s two things you c’n do if you’re a man. Live out of doors is one. Live in a hole is the other. I’ve set by my horse in the bresh some’eres and heared a rattlesnake many a time. Rattle, rattle, rattle!—he’d go, skeered to death. Skeered and dangerous! Somebody comin’ close to his hole! Somebody gonna step on him! Git his old fangs ready, full of pizen!”
In the smokehouse scene in Oklahoma! (Act One, Scene 2), Oscar Hammerstein conflated the two murders that Jeeter Fry indirectly acknowledges in Riggs’s play. In Hammerstein’s version, Jud Fry tells of a hired hand who, after finding his sweetheart on the Bartlett farm in the hayloft with a rival, bought a supply of kerosene over a period of weeks and burned down the farmhouse, killing the girl and both her parents. When he is left alone at the scene’s end, Jud, who had earlier joined in Curly’s comic threnody “Pore Jud is Daid,” delivers a solo of a darker hue, “Lonely Room.” This monologue of revenge and sexual longing (generally underappreciated before Shuler Hensley’s strong performance in the Trevor Nunn revival) begins by invoking Jud’s solitude:
The door squeaks,
There’s a fieldmouse a-nibblin’ on a broom,
And I set by myself
Like a cobweb on a shelf,
By myself in a lonely room.
In the song’s middle section, Jud’s erotic musing about the “soft arms” and “long, yeller hair” of his dream girl follows his burst of anger against Curly: “And I’m better’n that Smart Alec cowhand / Who thinks he is better’n me!” The chilling finale of the song vows that Jud will translate his lustful fantasies into action: “I ain’t gonna dream ’bout her arms no more! / I ain’t gonna leave her alone!”
When Lynn Riggs attended a rehearsal of Oklahoma! for the first time, Oscar Hammerstein asked whether he approved of “Lonely Room.” The playwright replied, “I certainly do. It will scare hell out of the audience.” Hammerstein was pleased: “That is exactly what it was designed to do.”
Hammerstein invented another plot element that lends further emphasis to Jud Fry’s homicidal fixation on Curly: a cylindrical peephole toy, called “the Little Wonder,” that is secretly fitted with a spring-blade knife. Only Aunt Eller’s timely intervention prevents Jud from attacking Curly with the insidious weapon at the box social.
Jeeter Fry is not the only source of violence in Green Grow the Lilacs. Communal disorder is institutionalized through the use of the “shivaree,” a noisy mock-serenade or sometimes more aggressive hazing of newlyweds that leaves its modern traces in the tin cans tied to the rear bumper of the bridal couple’s honeymoon car. It was the shivaree that encouraged Jeeter to imitate his earlier murder of the pregnant girl: the mob of neighbors taunting the newlyweds forced them onto the haystack that Jeeter tried to set afire. When Jeeter is killed during his fight with Curly after the fire is extinguished, the neighbors urge Curly to give himself up to authorities, even though Jeeter had accidentally fallen on his own knife. Aunt Eller tells Laurey (in Scene 6) that the male community has surrendered Curly not to uphold the law but to preserve the disreputable custom of shivareeing, which had facilitated Fry’s assault: “But you know the way everbody feels about shivoreein’. They got a right to it somehow. And a thing like this a-happenin’ in the middle of a shivoree—why, it looks bad, that’s all.” As the curtain falls on Green Grow the Lilacs, there is every expectation that shivarees will continue and that Curly will be freed after facing trial. Oklahoma!’s finale speeds Curly’s liberation by convening a kangaroo court to acquit him on the spot. Some theatergoers deride this happy finale as make-believe, but the lightninglike deliverance of Bessie Thompson by her Sapulpa jury should remind us not to underrate the nimbleness of early-twentieth-century Oklahoma justice.
Aunt Eller’s Sermon
When Laurey, in the final scene of Green Grow the Lilacs, despairs over the jailing of Curly, Aunt Eller preaches a sermon of survival, saying, “Oh, lots of things happens to a womern. Sickness, bein’ pore and hungry even, bein’ left alone in yer old age, bein’ afraid to die—it all adds up. That’s the way life is—cradle to grave. And you c’n stand it. They’s one way. You got to be hearty. You got to be.” Aunt Eller’s creed of “heartiness” is not founded on an optimism born of innocence, for she too has experienced the Oklahoma violence that infuses Lynn Riggs’s memories and writings. Eller is not a spinster, as many of her comic portrayals in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical may have led audiences to believe, but a widow whose husband, Jack Murphy, was murdered. Jack had “bought some hogs off Lem Slocum, and they turned out to be full of cholery—and all died.” Jack walked across the pasture to complain to his seller, and then night fell. When Eller went searching for him, she found his body near a worm fence, all huddled down in a corner—“Laid there all doubled up—dead—in a patch of yeller daisies. Len Slocum musta shot him. I didn’t know who done it. All I knowed was—my husband was dead.” To Eller, the identity of the murderer and the rights and wrongs of the quarrel that took her husband from her were secondary concerns that lost themselves in life’s fragility and the immutable fact of loss. With her homely eloquence she beautifully expresses the lesson of Lynn Riggs’s plays.
The plays of Lynn Riggs cited in this article are: Big Lake (New York: Samuel French, 1927), 15, 81; The Cherokee Night, in Russet Mantle and The Cherokee Night (New York: Samuel French, 1936), 139, 197, 260; Cream in the Well, in Four Plays (New York: Samuel French, 1947); Dark Encounter, in Four Plays; Green Grow the Lilacs (New York: Samuel French, 1931), vii, 19, 69–71, 75, 91, 143, 145–46; Hang on to Love (New York: Samuel French, 1948 [a revision of The Domino Parlor]), 21–23, 28, 131; Knives from Syria, in One-Act Plays for Stage and Study, 3rd ser. (New York: Samuel French, 1927); A Lantern to See By, in Sump’n Like Wings and A Lantern to See By (New York: Samuel French, 1928); Roadside (New York: Samuel French, 1930); Russet Mantle, in Russet Mantle and The Cherokee Night; A World Elsewhere, in Four Plays; The Year of Pilár, in Four Plays.
The successive drafts of Riggs’s unfinished novel “The Affair at Easter” in its unfinished state and a related working notebook and other papers are deposited in the Lynn Riggs Papers (YCAL MSS 61, box 9, folder 173 to box 10, folder 184) at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut.
My account of the Sapulpa, Oklahoma, murder case, on which Riggs’s novel is partially based, draws on the reports in the Sapulpa Herald, which were furnished to me by the courteous staff of the Sapulpa Historical Society.
The principal biography of Lynn Riggs is Phyllis Cole Braunlich’s Haunted by Home: The Life and Letters of Lynn Riggs (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 21–24, 64–65, 170–71. I am also indebted to Mrs. Braunlich for insights she generously provided in our telephone conversations. I also consulted Charles Edward Aughtry, “Lynn Riggs, Dramatist: A Critical Biography” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1959), 143.
Oscar Hammerstein’s praise of Green Grows the Lilacs appeared in his letter to the “Drama Mailbag” of the New York Times, Sept. 5, 1943.
Lynn Riggs’s sense of “hidden excitement” in Oklahoma is quoted from his “When People Say ‘Folk Drama,’” The Carolina Play-Book 4 (June 1931).
U.S. Marshal Evett Dumas Nix’s comment on the Doolin gang is quoted in his Oklahombres, as told to Gordon Hines (St. Louis: Eden Publishing House, 1929), 56.
Ronald Trekel’s observation that the Doolins “never plundered or killed in Tulsa” is found in Ronald L. Trekel, History of the Tulsa Police Department (Topeka, Kans.: Jostens Corporation, 1989), 19.
Rufus Buck’s spree is detailed in Carl Sifakis, The Encyclopedia of American Crime (New York: Facts on File, 1982), 217–18.
The quote from the unfinished Gerard Manley Hopkins poem in Riggs’s draft of “The Affair at Easter” is found in W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie, eds., The Poems of Gerald Manley Hopkins, 4th ed. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), 193.
The Claremore massacre is described in “Claremore’s Historical Summary,” http://www.claremore.org/historicalsociety/history.htm (accessed March 29, 2002; site now discontinued).
The Guthrie “racial outbreak” is noted in Arrell Morgan Gibson, Oklahoma: A History of Five Centuries, 2nd ed. (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1981), 213.
Professor Thomas Erhard’s argument that Hang on to Love reflects Riggs’s horror of lynchings is in Erhard’s Lynn Riggs, Southwest Playwright (Austin, Tex.: Steck-Vaughn, 1970), 37.
Henry Roth’s definition of Riggs’s theme as a conflict of individual impulses and constricting social forces found in Henry Roth, “Lynn Riggs and the Individual” [1930], in Shifting Landscapes: A Composite, 1925–1987, ed. Mario Materassi (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987), 13.
Professor Roger C. Aikin identifies Jud Fry as Jewish in his article “Property, Race, and Gender in “Oklahoma!” http://puffin-creighton.edu/fapa/aikin/Webfiles/WEST/property.htm (accessed Feb. 5, 2002; site now discontinued).
Oscar Hammerstein’s intention to frighten audiences with the song “Lonely Room” is quoted in Max Wilk, OK! The Story of Oklahoma! (New York: Grove Press, 1993), 83–84.
In telephone conversations I was fortunate in obtaining recollections of Riggs’s first cousin (once removed), Howard McNeill, on a fire that may have inspired a similar near-catastrophe at the end of those works. His daughter, Melinda Mc-Neill, has enlightened me on details of the Riggs-Thompson genealogy. Leo Cundiff, nephew of Lynn Riggs and long the keeper of his uncle’s memory, was very instructive to me about his family and its Oklahoma roots. He was able to tell me much about Jetar Davis, the part-Cherokee hod carrier, amateur wrestler, and “sort of the town drunk” who was immortalized as Jud Fry in Oklahoma!