The year was 1937. It was spring and I had just turned three. The redbuds and dogwoods were rioting beauty over the hillsides and tiny spring flowers were carefully opening in the new, pale green meadows. You know, as I said, I think the prettiest sight I have ever seen is looking across a gully at a hillside of dogwoods in full bloom. The trunks of the dogwoods are very dark, thin, spindly and almost invisible. When the trees are blooming, it’s like a garden of floating flower canopies suspended in mid-air. Those trees in bloom in the spring are magical, ethereal islands of blooms. Then, punctuate them with redbuds so profoundly pink that you can’t believe color like that really exists and the tender, delicate green hills are transformed into a wonderland.
Grandma Reed told me a story about the dogwood. She said that long, long ago the dogwood tree was big and strong. It stood tall and arrogant in the forest and lorded over the other trees. Then, when they needed a wooden cross on which to crucify Jesus, they chose the dogwood because it was so straight and strong. After that, the dogwood was so ashamed that it decided that it never wanted to be used that way again. So, it vowed always to grow thin and crooked – and so it has. That’s why you can’t see the trunk when the canopy of blossoms are blooming. I also think the dogwood wants you to concentrate on the blossoms, not on it. Grandma said that if you look at the blossoms, there are four petals. Those are for the four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. If you look closely, each petal has a place on the end that looks like a nail went through it leaving rust on it. Those are for the nails that were driven into Jesus’ hands and feet. Then if you look carefully in the middle, there are little prickles like thorns. That is for the crown of thorns He wore. You can learn at lot looking at a flower.
At that time of our starting for California, back in 1939, we were living in Watts, Oklahoma, a town of about 100 people in Northeastern Oklahoma, tucked into the rolling, forested hills of the Ozark country, close to the long, khaki-brown colored, ambling Illinois River and just six miles from the Arkansas line. Rumor has it that at one time Watts had been a promising, little, railroad boomtown but in my lifetime it had become one of those places left in the backwash of the supposedly onward movement of time. One could even say, perhaps, that as the wheels of time ground on, Watts was spit out by their grinding and the expelled residue consisted more of a ground-up sand from the wheels than useable grain.
Before my time, it was, indeed, a hideout for bandits and highway men and women like Jesse and Frank James and Belle Star in the lawless “Oklahoma Territory.” As I mentioned earlier, we had a great uncle killed by Jesse James. Jesse James was pretty respected where I came from.
Those of us who know Watts and have known it for generations, love Watts. We are like faithful husbands and wives who look tenderly at a fat, aging body of our life’s companions and see within that person all we have known and loved. Strangers come, stay a while and go. Yet, those faithful to Watts stay or return with fond memories in their hearts for the place that has spawned us and the unconventional, sometimes whimsical and always idiosyncratic and easy-going people who nurtured us.
As I said, when my mother was a teenager, Watts had been a booming railroad town. It was the end of the line for the railroad and the home of the all-important roundhouse. When my mother was a young woman, life in Watts seemed to revolve around the big old, wooden circular roundhouse. As I was told, the roundhouse was the structure built to turn around the huge lumbering steam engines of that era when they had reached the end of the line so they could go back in the other direction. There was a railroad hotel where my mother had worked as a young woman. She had many stories about her waitressing there – the railroad men who overnighted at the small hotel, the joking and laughter, the fellow with the juice harp (harmonica) who would pull it out and in no time bring tears to your eyes just with the haunting sadness of the melodies he could pull out of that small instrument. These were happy days for my mother and Watts was teeming with life and excitement. (My mother was a poet and writer and a great storyteller. Any experience, no matter how small was worthy of a good story to be told on quiet afternoons and evenings.) The old hotel was two story with a big porch all the way across the front. The porch was concrete with concrete steps leading up to it and a stuccoed-over concrete wall that surrounded it with big, square wooden pillars going from the concrete wall to the roof to hold up the roof. The top of the wall between the pillars consisted of a flat concrete “shelf” good for sitting. It evidently had been quite grand in its day and probably the biggest and most impressive building in Watts. In my childhood memory, it was pretty ramshackled. The concrete had cracked and the roof needed repair and sagged a bit. Yet, whenever we passed it, I was always able to see it through my mother’s eyes as well as in its present condition. (It has since been lovingly restored by one of those people such as myself, who comes from generations of “Watts’ lovers.”)
My grandfather’s store was away from the highway just down the alley, a half a block from the old hotel. The store was a long building covered with tan, fake brick, tarpaper siding. Their living quarters were in the back. His shed and workshop abutted the back yard of the hotel. Grandpa Willey owned one of the two country stores in town. Before he opened the store, he had been a baker, and a very good one I might add. I have never found cream horns anywhere in the world that even come near to rivaling his. When Watts could no longer support a bakery, he turned his into a full-service country store. He was owner, clerk, butcher, accountant, and purveyor of all necessary items needed for survival and with an occasional (very occasional) non-essential whimsy at one’s fingertips. He had large bins with humongous scoops in them, where he would dump huge 20-50 pound bags of flour, cornmeal, beans, sugar, and chicken and cow feed. He would then weigh out quantities people could afford on his marvelous scale. The scale was all brass with a marble slab on which he placed the bags to be weighed. I loved watching the big brass pointer swing back and forth as he carefully tapped in from his scoop just the amount his customer wanted. Then, he always went over the amount requested just a little bit and never charged for it, knowing that every family was just getting by and needed a bit extra. He was also an honest and good businessman and during the Depression, that tiny bit extra was much appreciated by his customers. I always felt warm inside watching the faces of the women who had carefully calculated to the cent what they could afford, becoming a little anxious when the scale settled a little over the requested amount. My grandfather would quickly start folding up the sack saying, “Ah, that’s okay, just about right. You said you needed a half pound, right?” Relief and gratitude would move across the woman’s face and she might even start to tear up. Before she could thank him he would say, “How are the kids doing? I heard little Clarice was ailing. Is she doing better?” Relieved with the change in topic, she would smile warmly and enter into conversation abandoning her worries for a few minutes.
“Now let’s see, I suppose you want me to write that down in your credit book, right?” Again, the shame and sadness as her eyes slid downward and her body sagged. “If you don’t mind?” she would say. Wordlessly, (for what could be said?), he would pull out the little receipt book with her name across the spine and make a detailed list of her purchases for the day, giving her the top page and keeping the copy in the book. The list was never long.
½ lb flour 16¢
¼ lb sugar 6¢
½ lb coffee 20¢
2 potatoes 07¢
¼ lb bacon 35¢
She would take the receipt and, keeping her eyes downcast, pack it into her bag. Then, just before she left he would say, “Oh, I almost forgot. Let me give you a jelly bean for each of the children,” and he would count out exactly one apiece and drop them in her bag. She would blush and say, “Thank you. I’m sorry I can’t pay our bill right now. We will when we can.” He would cut her off and say, “Of course you will. You always have. We have to keep growing children healthy now, don’t we?” as he ushered her to the door. I had seen the scene repeated so often that the faces of the women all seem to blend together in my mind. There were many of them and they always seemed to know to come when no one else was in the store – to save face – for everyone. Sometimes, I believed Grandpa and Mr. Waldroop, the other grocer, were keeping the whole town alive. I am quite sure that almost a whole generation of children in that small town grew to adulthood as relatively healthy persons because of Grandpa’s and Mr. Waldroop’s “credit books.”
After they left, I would often question my grandpa.
“Will they ever pay, Grandpa?” I would ask.
“Of course they will when they have it, Elizabeth Anne. They’ve just hit upon some hard times right now like a lot of people.”
I could never see how he made any money and that didn’t seem to be what was important. He needed to know that the children were being fed and community always was more important than money. We, after all, had our garden, cows and chickens. We wouldn’t starve.
That’s the way business was carried on in Indian Country.
My grandfather was crippled from a childhood injury. One leg was much shorter than the other and he had a built-up shoe on the shorter foot. This didn’t correct his gait and he walked with a pronounced limp, stepping out with his crippled foot as he threw his hip out and then quickly moving the other foot forward. I always thought he looked a little like a duck with a broken leg. It must have been painful and required a lot of effort for him to move around at all. He worked long, hard hours and I never once heard him complain. He would buy sides of beef for the store and then do all his own butchering. I was amazed how he could swing one of those big sides of beef around, plop it on the butcher block and, with a razor-sharp boning knife that he had just “stropped,” turn it into steaks, roasts, short ribs and hamburger. He made the best sausage in the world. We grew the sage ourselves. His sausage ranked right up there with his cream horns. I was underfoot a lot because I always liked to be in on what was going on and everyone, even a little three- or four-year-old, chipped in and helped when needed.
My grandfather was also very intelligent and well-read. My mother would often say that if he had had a chance, he would have gone to college and had a profession. The one sacred time of the day when we all had to be very quiet and respectful was when Walter Winchell was on the radio. Grandpa would pull his chair up close to the large, old, wooden radio with the curved cabinet, take off his glasses to rest his eyes, and lean his bald head, rimmed with white hair, close to the radio so as not to miss a word. I’ll never forget, “I’ll be back in a flash with a flash.” Mr. Winchell, which is what we called him, always said that. Most of the news was about what was happening in Europe (a place very, very far away), and the economy and Mr. Winchell always ended with a human interest story. These I liked the best. If we were quiet, we were allowed to gather around in a circle and listen with Grandpa but we could never disturb him. He was the elder and therefore respected. To me, he was Grandpa Willey. His name was Afton Eustace Willey.
Grandma Willey was Black Dutch. She was a heavy-set, roundish, plain woman who worked very hard. She compensated for my grandfather’s being crippled and did almost all the heavy work. She oversaw the cows, the house and the garden. When a chicken needed to be killed, she did it. She had two ways of killing a chicken. One was to hold it on the block and chop its head off. The other was to grab it by the head and upper neck and swing it around in a circle until its head came off. Either way, she would drop it and the chicken would flop around on the ground until the life left it. I was simultaneously fascinated and horrified by the process. She then dipped it in scalding water and plucked it. I would help her with the plucking of the feathers. I would watch her and marvel at how killing it didn’t seem to affect her. I now believe it did affect her and it had to be done so she did it to feed the four hungry “boys” she had borne to my grandfather, and herself, my grandfather, my parents and me. The hallmark of her life seemed to be doing what had to be done – without fanfare, without complaint. Almost everything we ate came from her garden and the animals she kept, augmented by the store. She baked all our bread and she usually let me churn the butter so that we had fresh butter and buttermilk from the cream saved from our Jersey milk cows. The churn was a big glass jar with a top that had paddles that went down into the cream and had a large handle on top fitted with gears that made the paddles turn. I loved the glass jar because I could see the process of the butter forming as I turned the handle. Grandma was a plain woman and she seemed to make every effort to make herself plainer than she was. She had a round face that was creased with the lines of a hard life. That face supported two large, dark brown eyes which, while they often looked tired and somewhat sad, seemed to me to be filled with a shy, gentle lovingness. Her hair was black and sprinkled with gray and she wore it in a plain bob blunt cut that ended just below her ears. In front, she either pinned it back with a bobby pin on each side or tucked it behind her ears. Her hair was something to be dealt with – that was all. It was never something to adorn or be fussed with. Her dresses were shapeless masses that slid over her head and hung on her as body covering. With a seam on each shoulder and one down each side – that was it except for two pockets always filled with something like keys, seeds or whatever she needed for her everyday work. The neck hole, armholes and bottom were machine hemmed. She could cut one out and run it up on the treadle sewing machine in less than thirty minutes. All of her dresses were made from printed flour sack or feed sack material. Her petticoats and underwear were made from plain flour sacks. We were lucky to have the feed sack and flour sack material. Since my grandfather ordered all this feed, flour and grain in big bags and then emptied them into the bins, we got the pick of the very best of the prints. The bags were printed with all kinds of designs, flowers, toys, geometrics, and scenes. Of course, they were made so that when we washed them, all the printing came out and all that was left was what we considered to be a beautiful piece of material. Mother always picked the sacks over carefully, choosing the very best that she could decorate with rickrack, bias binding, or pieces of other worn-out clothes and turn into something fashionable and beautiful for me, herself or my other grandma. Grandma Willey always encouraged my mother to take whatever she wanted and Grandma would use the rest for dresses for herself, shirts for Grandpa or the “boys,” sell them, give them away or use them for dish towels. There was absolutely no competition for the ones she used for her slips and underwear! Her shoes were a horror. I was sure that they had been sturdy Oxfords sometime in the distant past but they were hardly recognizable as such when I remember them. She had broken the heels down by “slipping them on” too many times to count and the back of the shoes no longer existed for their intended purpose. The backs were bent completely down flat so she could slip her feet in and out as she chose – like clogs. She never wore her “outside” shoes in the house and always went barefoot or wore slippers.
My mother, who, like her Grandmother Reed who raised her, sewed her clothes carefully and always took time to have added tucks, lace, embroidery and smocking. She was always trying to give my Grandmother Willey something nice so “she could fix up once in a while.” At every Mother’s Day, birthday and Christmas, Mother would give her nice dresses, good underwear, a lovely hat, a “dress” purse or new shoes. Grandma Willey would always open the gift carefully, slowly taking it in with her eyes, gently touching her fingers to it, almost stroking it, and then would look up and say, “It’s beautiful. You shouldn’t have. Thank you so much. I’ll just put it in the cedar chest for safe-keeping,” never to be seen again except maybe at a funeral or trip into Siloam Springs to see the doctor. Mother would chime in with her usual response, “I didn’t buy them to go in the cedar chest. I bought them for you to wear.”
“I know, and they’re just beautiful. I’ll just put them in the chest for safe-keeping,” my Grandma Willey would say softly. She was a woman of few words – with a will of steel.
Mother was often concerned that Grandma Willey devalued herself. I don’t know about that. She adored and looked up to her husband as someone very intelligent and informed. She bore four sons and raised them well and she worked. She saw her life as work and she did it, plain and simply. For me, she was my Grandma Willey and I loved her and felt loved by her, although one could never conceivably in any way shape or form describe her as warm or affectionate. Hers was a kind of love you had to watch and listen for. It was deep and quiet, never on the surface. We never talked about her being Cherokee. We never talked about this with any of us. I was being “protected” to keep me from the boarding schools and no one around us talked about our heritage. At that time, it was much safer to “pass” if you could. And – we all grew up in the old ways in the important things and trying to adapt to the “new” ways for safety.
My other grandmother, Grandma Reed, was one of the most important people in my life. She was my great-grandmother, really, as my mother’s mother had died in childbirth. She was my primary parenting figure in the first three years of my life. She taught me from the time of my birth – and probably before – for all I know.
Grandma Reed was a regal woman and a lady. Though poor – we were all poor and I didn’t know that as a child. I just knew we were short of money sometimes. We certainly were not poor in any other way that I could feel or see. She always dressed in and carried herself with style. She was tall (to me then) and thin, not weighing over ninety-eight pounds. She carried herself with a majestic grace – body straight as an arrow and head held high, looking out on her world from a confident place of dignity. Her face was thin and narrow with years of life etched into it. When I came into her life, she had lost a daughter, a husband and her sisters. Only her son, her granddaughter and great-granddaughter were left for her to teach, to love, and to care for her. She had a long, hawk-like, Roman nose seated between clear cornflower-blue eyes. Her hair was long and silky. I used to love to watch her brush it. It was so long that she would run the brush through it as far as her arms would reach and then, she would have to pull it through the brush the rest of the way. Her hair was already silver when I knew her and it contained a yellow hint of past goldenness of years long since gone. She wore it in a bun held with hairpins at the back of her neck. She was the gentlest, most loving person in my life and she infused me with her love and her wisdom. I loved it when she would brush my hair. Her touch was so gentle, it felt like an angel’s kiss. Probably my earliest memory is when I was a toddler being bathed by her. That was during the Depression and Mother was working as a waitress to help support the family and Grandma Reed was in charge of me. She would bathe me in the living room where it was warm, her hands gently sponging the water over my little body. Then, she would pat me dry with a towel – “It’s not good to rub a baby’s skin. It needs to be patted.” Then she would dress me in my pajamas and I would run to the bedroom to the bed with the big feather bed, which she had already warmed with a hot brick wrapped in a towel. I would hop on the bed and lie back with my feet hanging over the edge and she would glide in with a warm wet cloth in her hand “to wipe the dust off” the soles of my feet. She never would use a wash cloth to bathe me. “Wash cloths were too harsh!” She used a piece of a very well-worn, old sheet. These “cloths” were as soft as eiderdown. After she wiped my feet, she would tuck me into the warm feather bed. That would be the last memory I would have that night.
Grandma Reed was a medicine woman and “doctored” all our family and all who came to her. Much of our time together was spent roaming the fields and woods, gathering, picking, cutting and digging foods and medicines. With each herb or plant, she taught me how to prepare it and how to use it.
“In nature,” she would say. “We have all we need. When something makes us ill, there is always something to make us well again. Remember that, Elizabeth Anne.”
My times with her could fill a book but that is not what this book is about. I will save these treasures in my heart for another time.
The others in my immediate circle were my uncles. Daddy was the oldest of four boys. Marvin was next. He was the one I knew the least until I grew up as he was away soon after my memory of childhood kicked in at about two-and-a-half or three. Francis was next. He called me “Blondie,” and insisted that his dates had to be willing for me to tag along. On one of his dates, he took me to Wuthering Heights, a movie that is forever etched in my memory. He loved me dearly as I loved him. Then, there was Leslie, five years my senior who was more like a brother than an uncle. He and I had many adventures. I always went with him to milk the cows. He had taught the barn cats to open their mouths when he squirted milk at them. Both he and they became quite skilled at this. Of course I usually got “squirted” in the process! We grew up together. We swam, climbed trees, and explored ourselves and our world. He was Tarzan. I was Jane. He was Buck Rogers. I was Wilma.
One day, he and some of his “friends” were exploring eating some root of Indian paintbrush and he asked me if I wanted to try it. Of course I wanted to be included with the “big boys” so I eagerly said yes and took a big bite, ignoring the conspiratorial look among the boys.
As soon as my mouth clamped down on it, it was on fire! A fire like I had never experienced before or since. Thai, Mexican or Indian food – the hottest – couldn’t hold a candle to Indian paintbrush. I let out a yowl that could be heard in the next county. I could see the panic in Leslie’s face as my little legs tore for the store. Everything my grandparents did – water, food, milk – just made it burn more. There was nothing to do but live through it. Leslie got in big trouble. I felt sorry for him. I could see that he got carried away with the big boys and didn’t mean to hurt me, and felt bad about it. I also knew that he had been tricked like I had been and his mouth had burned as bad as mine. We shared having a joke played on us. Maybe that is why that incident didn’t affect my love and trust of him at all. Anyway, it didn’t.
Marvin and Leslie were fairer, had curly hair and had a taller body build, looking more like my grandfather. Daddy (Virgil) and Francis had rounder faces, darker hair, and complexion and eyes and a body type more like my Grandma Willey’s.
So this family and Watts were where I started my journey.
I remember Watts as a safe, gentle place. The park, had a long-since non-functional, tiered, Ozark rock fountain, and an aging bandstand was cattycorner from my grandparent’s store. It seemed large and spacious and was perfect for hide-and-seek – especially in early evenings when the lightning bugs came out and filled the heavy summer air with magic candles.
The city hall, made out of the same pitted Ozark rock, stood at the top of the hill of the sloped park at the corner away from my grandparent’s store. Large oaks and cottonwoods, with trunks that could hide a child, dotted the park. On the same side of the street as my Grandfather’s store, the sidewalk ended at the alley that bordered his store. We only had two blocks of sidewalk in Watts and this was one of them. Often, several of us kids would load into a wagon at the top of the hill and fly down the sidewalk. The only problem was that the sidewalk ended abruptly with a broken drop-off at the alley. Amidst the thrill of our catapulting down the hill with screams and giggles, we had to make the decision whether to start dragging our feet midway down and significantly reduce our speed so as not to fly off the precipice or “risk it” and throw caution to the wind, prolonging the thrill. This, alas, was the level of important decision-making that confronted us daily in our life in Watts. As I look back, it seems that this decision with the wagon has symbolically repeated itself many times in my life since.
When I say Watts was a safe place for us as kids, I have come to believe that this early feeling of safety has been a major factor in my life and the way I have lived it. There was a gaggle of us kids that played together ranging from three-years-old to eight or so and growing-up together. We had the free reign of Watts – with prescribed limits, of course. We could go down to but not across the highway or anything beyond that. We could go into these areas with adult supervision only. The highway curved to the left as it passed through town so it was our boundary. Mind you, the “highway” was a two-lane dirt road. Still, it was the main artery between Siloam Springs, Arkansas, and Stillwell, Oklahoma, the county seat and points south, so it was to be reckoned with. My grandfather’s store was a block down the alley from the highway. It seemed a great distance at the time and more than enough room to roam. We could go up to Main Street and the other country store, the Waldroop’s, and the drugstore owned by Miss Nettie Ezell. I loved Miss Nettie Ezell! She was a widow lady whose husband, Dr. Ezell, had been long-since dead and she maintained the drugstore they had established. Most people called her Miss Nettie, but since I was a child, my mother made it clear that I needed to use her last name, too, in order to show the proper respect. So I was to call her Miss Nettie Ezell, which I did until the day she died when I was grown. Whenever I had any money to spend, I would head for Miss Nettie Ezell’s. Her store had big, plate-glass windows on either side of double glass doors. The doors were tall and wooden with glass at the top and bottom. These doors seemed huge to me at the time and I loved just standing and looking at them. I liked all the glass and openness of her store. My grandfather’s store was crowded and stuffed with just about everything anyone would need for anything. Miss Nettie Ezell’s store was open and spacious. After I had absorbed my wonder with the front doors, I was ready to enter and what a world that was! The door handle was attached to a big brass piece, both of which she kept polished! The door handle was big curved brass, ending in a little matching upturned emphasis at the bottom. This brass curved handle was clearly made for a big adult hand to grasp. Above it was the key to being admitted to Miss Nettie Ezell’s. There was a huge brass lever upon which adults could put their thumbs and press down toward the big brass handle being held by their hand. With luck, this magical contraption opened the large right-hand door. I believed that the difficulty of gaining admission to Miss Nettie Ezell’s inner sanctum was somehow proportionate to the importance held within. My little hands could never grasp with the hand and push with the thumb at the same time. This door was clearly a two-handed job for me, which meant that I would have to let go of my tightly held nickel or pennies for a while in order to win entrance. Thus, my “spending money” was carefully entrusted to a pocket for a short time. If I stood on my toes, I could grasp the big brass handle with my left hand, push down on the thumb latch with my right hand, throw all my weight on my right hand, push against the door with my body at the same time and if I was lucky, the big door would swing open to reveal the wonders therein!
The inside of Miss Nettie Ezell’s drugstore was always a bit dark and mysterious. It was cavernous and ran almost the length of the building which was probably about 75-100 feet long and about 40 feet wide. The ceilings were very high with patterned pressed tin. They were beautiful. They had grown a bit dusty and dingy over the years but I thought they were beautiful.
The store was almost empty. Long glass-topped and glass-sided display cases lined the front of the store and the walls and had very little in them. I’m not sure if Miss Nettie Ezell ever replenished her stock. I now think that perhaps after Dr. Ezell died, she just decided to keep the store open until everything was sold and did so. Some of the stock was absolutely ancient and I am sure had been there since my mother was a girl. No matter. It was the only other store in town besides my grandfather and the Waldroop’s and they had almost all the same stock and my grandfather’s was free. This meant that when I wanted to go on a spending spree on my own in Watts, Miss Nettie Ezell’s was it.
It seemed to me that, for Miss Nettie Ezell, the store was more of a social institution than a business. After conquering the door and getting in, the first image was that of Miss Nettie Ezell sitting in her rocking chair by the stove. She was always dressed like a Victorian lady with her hair piled or knotted on her head. I loved the lace on her dresses always held by a delicate cameo. She seemed so proper and elegant. There were other upholstered chairs by the stove near her and she always offered treats and tea or something to drink (never liquor, of course) to anyone who entered. If my mother came with me, she and my mother would drink tea and visit while I shopped. The store was always cool in summer and warm in winter with her stove glowing with heat – all in all, a marvelous place to be. And, the most wonderful thing of all – she never rushed me. I could shop as long as I wanted and she let me “feel” everything. She would patiently pull one thing after another out of the case for me to examine at length. Of course, all of us kids knew that we had to be serious shoppers to go there, we couldn’t just go there for treats and waste Miss Nettie Ezell’s time. She was, after all, a business lady and our parents made it quite clear what our limits were. I never left empty-handed.
The same rules did not apply at other places in Watts. Across the street from my grandfather’s store was Mrs. Carney’s place. We all called her Mother Carney. She was the mother of my mother’s best friend, Nannie White. Mother slipped and called Mother Carney, “Mother White” sometimes because she had grown up calling her that. Mr. White had died long before my time and Mother White had married Mr. Carney who had also died before I was born. She seemed ancient to me and I loved her. She was the grandmother of my best friends Nancy, Carol Ann and Mary Jane (Nannie White had married Titus Chinn and they had three girls and later a boy, Alvin.) Nannie and Mother remained friends throughout their lives.
Mother Carney ran the post office in her house. She collected various varieties of hollyhocks and iris (we collected unusual varieties for her until her death) and she baked. Oh my, did she bake. The smells that came out of her kitchen were a marvelously tantalizing joy to behold. No matter where we were in our territory or free zone, when something was coming out of the oven at Mother Carney’s we knew it and made a beeline for her place. She was always waiting for us with a plate full of something scrumptious. We all knew not to be pigs and made sure that the shy ones and the younger ones got theirs and we had a tea party almost every day it seems. There was another woman who lived in the big house with a huge round porch up on the hill who churned butter every week and if we just happened by, she would give us fresh buttermilk and cookies. We rarely missed her churning day either.
All in all, we had almost complete freedom to play and be children and the entire town looked out for us. It was a Cherokee town and that is the Cherokee way. Later in my life, I have reflected on how special and unusual that whole time was. For the first seven years of my life – on weekends and visits after three (we moved away when I was three and frequently returned) – I grew up feeling free and safe. I believe that this freedom and security gave me an inner strength and confidence which forms a core of my being. I owe much to that little town and the people whose lives graced it for a time.
In the summer of 1937, my father was offered a full-time job as an appliance repairman for Montgomery Ward in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Jobs were hard to come by in those times. Our part of the country was still in the Depression – and there was no employment in or around Watts, so he accepted it. I know that it was difficult for both my parents to leave Watts, probably much more for my mother than my father as we had to leave my great-grandmother alone. Muskogee was a long way from Watts (or it seemed that way at the time) and a job was a job. I knew that they felt lucky to have a job anywhere. I had listened to Walter Winchell. Times were hard. People had to go to the bigger cities to find work so we packed up and moved, returning to Watts regularly, visiting and raiding my grandfather’s store.
My father had no training in appliance repair work. Yet, he seemed to be able to repair or make anything. This was a belief I held all my life which invariably was supported by reality.
In fact, I actually, because of him, came to believe that the ability to make or fix anything was a sex-linked gene and every man had it. Unfortunately as an adult, I discovered that this was not true and had to take more responsibility for what he taught me. It was as if he had a mind that automatically understood mechanics and electronics. After the war started, he went to work for the Civilian Signal Corps and later, while working for the Federal Aviation Administration, was one of the people who did the early research and development of the radar used in aviation navigation (The VOR and Low Frequency Range). All this early research in radar was done without the benefit of a college degree or technical study, except for on-the-job training and a few courses offered by the government. He pioneered in electronic work – not through education (I believe he later greatly regretted not having his degree), but through intelligence, natural talent, boundless curiosity, and hard work. So, it is easy to see why Montgomery Ward did a very smart thing in hiring him as their appliance repair man. I believed this as a three-year-old and I believe it now, seventy-eight years later.
Muskogee was a big city for us. One of the first things my daddy taught me when we moved there was how to find my way home. I believe now that he was concerned about my feeling or getting lost in such a big city. He never mentioned his concern. As was typical of him, he only focused on the solution and made a game out of it to boot. Whenever we would go out, he would say “Okay, Elizabeth Anne, find your way home.” When we first moved there, I was barely three and he would take me out for walks and “let” me find my way home. After we had lived in Muskogee for a while, we would play the same game in the car. He would stop at each intersection and say “Which way, Elizabeth Anne?” He would then wait for me to decide (traffic was much less in those days) before moving. Sometimes, he would deliberately make a wrong turn and I would immediately shout, “No, no, Daddy. Not this way, that way!” pointing in the right direction. He would smile a broad, warm smile with his gold tooth glistening (The gold tooth had replaced or capped – I’m not sure – one of his front teeth which had reportedly been knocked out by a wood chip when he was chopping wood.) I loved that gold tooth! Not many kids had a daddy with a shiny gold tooth glistening right up in the front of his mouth where everyone could see it! When he smiled that smile, the car would fill up with love and approval and he would say, “Very good, Elizabeth Anne, very good!” Both my parents took great pains to see that I was oriented in time and space and throughout my life, I used these skills taught me so early. No matter where I am, I rarely get lost or disoriented. In fact, even when I am in a place that is new and strange to me, I usually can go directly to where I want to be. In the woods or in the city, I have an almost completely infallible sense of direction. I believe that sense of directionality and orientation is due to this early training and the confidence instilled in me in the process of these “games” we played when I was young. This is the Indian way of teaching.
As I said, when I was three years old, my father had taken a job as a repairman for Montgomery Ward in Muskogee, Oklahoma. It was a long way from Watts, Oklahoma, which was “home” to us and also our first “leaving” of our roots.
One of my clear memories of Muskogee, and our first “adventure” in our new home, was “the turtle” we had rescued on the road. We were always rescuing something.
I remember we rented a big white house with green trim. Across the rear of the house was a screened-in porch with a concrete floor. This back porch was where we put the box turtle we had rescued from the highway on the way back from one of our weekend visits “home” to Watts, where we visited with grandparents and friends. Bringing home a turtle was a new experience for my three-year-old self, with much excitement attached. After we put him down, we all rushed inside to the kitchen to watch and wait for him to come out of his shell. The kitchen was big, going almost completely across the entire back of the house. On the right as we entered the kitchen, was a window that looked out over the screened porch. There was also a window over the sink but it was much too high for me so I rushed over to the window beside the door that had a full view of the screened room.
Daddy grabbed a chair and, without disturbing my watching, carefully and gently pulled me up in his lap. Daddy said that I had to be very quiet and very still or the turtle would not come out. I remember gluing my eyes on him as I tried to be the stillest three-year-old in Oklahoma and dutifully control every muscle in my body. I felt like I would burst because the only way I knew to be really, really still was to hold my breath. If he didn’t come out before I had to breathe, I might be responsible for his not coming out and I couldn’t bear that.
As I was sitting on Daddy’s knee, he must have noticed my not-breathing philosophy because he quietly leaned over and softly whispered, “It’s okay to breathe, Elizabeth Anne.” I remember the relief. Not only could I breathe but if he had whispered maybe it was all right to whisper. Maybe box turtles didn’t mind whispering. The questions started.
“When’s he coming out?” “Is he afraid?” “Doesn’t he know we won’t hurt him?” “We took him off the highway, didn’t we?” “Can he hear us?” My breath-holding had transformed itself into a million ideas and questions all pressing to be expressed before more silence might be imposed.
My dad smiled, readjusted his position as he shifted me on his knee and whispered, “Just watch and wait, Elizabeth Anne. He’ll come out when he’s ready.” I heard this phrase, “just watch and wait” a lot as I was growing up. Being still and observing was highly valued as a way to learn in our family. Sometimes, when a person is busy forming and asking questions, they may completely miss seeing what is happening or what is there to see and learn. Besides, questions require your head to get busy. Watching and waiting requires your being to be alert. Again, this is the Indian way of learning.
I waited and while I waited, I watched. I looked at his beautiful domed shell. The designs were perfect – line within line, square within square spread across his house. His house! What a wonder to have your house always with you! No renting, no moving, just his house. I marveled at the way he could just pull in his legs and head and shut up tight – and he could stay there as long as he wanted! He was in charge of this situation as is often true in life that other people or other forces are in charge even when we think we are. If we wanted to see him, we were the ones who would have to wait! And wait we did!
After my initial flurry of activity and questions, I settled into waiting. Daddy never seemed to have any question but that I would settle into active waiting and I did. I became so involved in watching and waiting that I lost all sense of time and place. Nothing else existed except me, the box turtle, and Daddy’s knee. We waited. With utter fascination, I drank him into my being. I fixed on him with all the intensity that I could muster in my three-year-old body.
Now don’t get me wrong. This wasn’t my first experience with a box turtle. I had seen them. I had seen them along the road. I had seen them squashed on the road during their migration season. I had seen them when for the umpteenth time my mother had said, “Virgil, stop the car,” and she had jumped out and retrieved one from the middle of the road and sure death and deposited it in the ditch. Oh yes, I had seen them before but they were never ours! They were never mine! This one could be a pet if I wanted, they said. A pet! A pet turtle. My pet turtle. I could hardly contain myself with the idea until I began to watch and wait. Then, all was watching and waiting – and silence! I remember the silence. It was as if this was the first real thing we were to share – the turtle and I – the silence.
It was late. It was dark. Normally I would be in bed. Not tonight. This was too big an event. All routines were put aside as I waited and watched. I watched with so much intensity that I began not to see – or so it seemed because I became aware of a very quiet and gentle nudge from my father – perhaps I was dozing, who knows? I certainly thought I was watching! When I looked, the turtle was starting to open his shell – ever-so-slightly. I turned and looked at my Daddy. I was so excited I could hardly stand it. My eyes widened and electrified. My mouth was pursed for a squeal when Daddy’s finger went to his lips to shush me. How impossible it seemed to contain all that excitement within my small body and I trusted that Daddy was right. Quickly, I looked back and the shell was opening wider. Daddy was right!
Then, I saw the turtle’s head peak out – a little stub nose with a nostril on either side – two eyes right behind them surveying the porch just as we were surveying him. I was ecstatic! The colors – oh, the colors. I had never seen such colors – bright, yellow stripes running down his head and neck – even brighter than the yellow-gold on his shell. Then the dark green stripes in between. A dark green, the color of a wet hardwood forest in mid-August when the broad leaves have grown into their richness and opened to sweet, summer rain which should make things cooler and never do in August when everything is at its fullest. The gardens are bulging and the earth bursts forth, sharing the abundance of its bounty with those who are grateful. The forests seem lazy and complete. The rains arouse and wake them up as the leaves are washed clean of the dry dust that had accumulated. This turtle’s green was that August green – green and yellow with a touch of red for emphasis.
Slowly, very slowly, his legs came out, bent at the knees with little claws on the end of each foot. He lifted his shell – his home – and he began to explore his new home – our new home. I was exhausted with the excitement and the waiting and watching. Both the turtle and I had a new home. I fell back against my Daddy and he carried me to bed.
This is my first memory of my new home in Muskogee. How wise they were to pick up the turtle, my new pet, to ease the move from the world I had known up to then.
We settled into life in Muskogee – commuting regularly back to Watts to be with home friends and family. Then, shortly afterwards, we moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where my dad became head of the appliance and repair department for Montgomery Ward.
Before I actually start us on the trip to the Klamath River, there is one other important member of the family I need to introduce you to so you, the reader, can have a clear picture of all the individuals who participated in this adventure. This important “person” was our dog, Lincoln. Lincoln was a long-haired border collie. He was black with white markings on his chest and feet. He had spots of brown above his eyes and some bordering the white on his feet and chest. He was just the right size – not one of those “little, yapping dogs” as my father would say – and not one of those dogs so big that he could not comfortably share the back seat with me. He was the size that, when I was five years old and stood beside him, my hand just naturally rested on and patted his back. He was almost always right beside me. I have often said that he was my third parent and had a significant role in raising me.
Ol’ Lincoln, as we used to call him (we had him for twelve years), came to us in a special way. My mother was always a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln. Mother (and my father too for that matter) always made sure that we traveled and were “educated” in every sense of the word. This meant that we often took family trips to experience history firsthand. Mother decided that we should go visit New Salem, which was outside of Springfield, Illinois. It was where Abraham Lincoln had lived – not where he was born, of course. Everyone knew that he was born in a log cabin in Kentucky. New Salem had been preserved as a park and historical site and it was possible to go in the cabins and museums and see exactly how Abraham Lincoln had lived. So, we loaded Grandma and Grandpa Willey, and Leslie, my dad’s youngest brother, in the car with Mother and Daddy and me and off we went to New Salem to get educated and experience Lincoln’s life.
As soon as we had unloaded ourselves from the car, walked across the parking lot, and entered the “grounds” of New Salem, this lovely black dog came bounding up to us. Of course both Leslie and I were thrilled and started petting him. The park ranger came rushing up and said, “Oh, I’m so glad you came back for him. I knew no one would leave such a fine dog as that deliberately.” We all looked at one another with questioning faces and my mother said, “He’s not our dog. We’ve never seen him before.” The man’s face fell and he said, “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that.” As we all headed toward the first building – with Leslie and me and the dog, it was love at first sight. The black dog proudly accompanied us from building to building, log cabin to log cabin. When we entered each one, he would politely sit down outside and wait for us to come out. Then he would excitedly greet us and walk with us to the next. When we had seen the whole village, we were back where we started and the dog was still with us.
“Are you sure you won’t take him with you? He sure is a mighty fine dog,” the ranger said.
“No, I’m sorry, we can’t,” said my father. “We don’t need a dog and we don’t have any room anyway,” he continued, taking a firm position. Grandma and Grandpa said nothing and Mother looked grim.
“Please, please,” I said. “I’ll take care of him. He won’t be any trouble.”
“Ah, come on, Virgil. Let us take him with us,” Leslie chimed in. “Elizabeth Anne just loves him,” he added, knowing that I was less likely to be turned down than he was by the family since I was little, cute, the only girl and the only grandchild. We both got away with a lot because of my particular status in the family and he knew it.
“No,” said Daddy. “And that’s the end of it. Now get in the car.”
The dog stood there expectantly wagging his tail as we all morosely piled into the car. I was crying. Leslie was crying. Mother looked significantly grimmer and my grandparents sat in the back seat enveloped with a heavy silence. Daddy drove off rather faster than usual and Leslie and I both got up on our knees and looked out the back window. The dog was following us! As we speeded up, he pushed himself harder. The road was dusty and we could see him running as fast as he could. No one said a word. Finally, he could run no farther and he stopped, in the middle of the road, looking heart-broken and sat down, ears drooping and head sagging. I can still see him in my mind’s eye today and tears fill my eyes as they did then. Suddenly, in unison, we all shouted, “Stop the car!” My dad hit the brakes so fast that they squealed and the tires skidded. He threw the car in reverse. Through the clearing dust we could see that the dog saw us and he perked up and sprang into action. My mother already had the front door of the car open and when we met, he jumped in on her lap, licking her face as he passed, then mine, then Daddy’s – in seconds. Before we could get our breath, he was in the back seat licking Grandma, Leslie, and Grandpa, then back in the front seat for another round. Everyone was laughing and crying at the same time, including the dog who whimpered and licked, licked and whimpered. When things settled down, Mother said, “We’ll call him Lincoln,” and no one disagreed. He was with us for the next twelve years and went everywhere with us so, of course, he was in the car as we headed out on Willey’s Gold Rush.
Clearly, we belonged together.
Deciding to Go and Leave Roots and Family
We hadn’t been in Fayetteville long when old friends of my parents arrived back in Oklahoma fresh from gold mining in Northern California.
My dad remembered it this way:
Willey’s great gold rush started, I believe, in 1938. It all came about because my old school chum, Vance Smith, had come back to Watts for a visit. That summer we were catching bullfrogs and shipping them to Kansas City. 1 He was telling me about his experience at gold mining up in the Klamath River. It seems that a company was formed down in Los Angeles where he had been working. The agreement was that the workers went up there and got food and lodging, of course, free of charge, and they would share in the profits. So the first three or four months there were no profits, because of the fact that they had a steel cable stretched across the Klamath River and to that they had tied a barge with a big gravel pump on it with the idea that they would pump the gravel and gold out of the bed of the river. Of course the gold had found to gravel. That didn’t prove successful because the water was so swift and there were so many big rocks in there, they couldn’t get around the rocks to pump the gravel. So they went back to L.A. and they came up with the idea – they had made a great big rack which they took across the river tied to the pulley system which tied to the cable system that held the boat in the stream. They dropped the rack and had a big Cat to pull it across. Well, they pulled out a lot of rocks, but of course, again the water was so swift that all the gravel and gold just washed right on down the river. So that proved to be a fizzle.
What I remember of this time, was the excitement of Vance Smith’s coming home from California. It was like the return of the conquering hero. Few people really left or got away from Watts, Oklahoma, and fewer still returned if they did. After Vance returned, there were many long nights spent sitting around together talking about his adventures, what the country was like, the wildness of it all, the people he’d met, the salmon and the local Indians along the river who caught them. I always was included in these conversations and could ooh and aah and ask questions along with the grownups. I usually crawled into my mother’s or father’s lap and listened until I fell asleep, waking up in my bed the next morning. My impression is that these discussions lasted long into the night.
My dad immediately swung into action on “the gold mining problem.” Give my father a problem to solve and he was in his glory. The whole town knew it. When he was in high school in the 1920’s, he had designed and built a movie projector from scratch from scraps and showed the first and only movies at the city hall in Watts. Until his death, many years later, when he would encounter a “problem,” he would tackle it, sit in his easy chair, (for days if necessary), come to a solution in his mind – exclaim, “I think I’ve got it,” and get up from his chair and head to his workshop to build a model and try it out. This is how he did his early research for the Civilian Signal Corps and the Civil Aeronautics Association. Many were the complaints I heard later in my life when “the government changed and tightened up and we could no longer build a model out of scraps and try it out. Now we have to farm it out, requisition a model to be built by some company and if it doesn’t work, it’s just a waste of time and money. I even have to requisition a screwdriver if I want one now. It’s crazy.” Perhaps this approach to problem solving and the curtailments and progressive restrictions he felt in working for the U.S. Government account for the four, stress-related heart attacks he had while working for the U.S. Government before he took early retirement.
But this was 1938. He was young and life was before him and my mother. Discussions led to ideas – ideas led to adventure.
As my father tells it:
And then Vance and I got the idea that we’d go up there and do a little sluicing. Sluicing is when you use a great big pump and a big stream of water and wash it down and through your trough. They called it a sluice box. It is nothing but a trough with a lot of ripples put in it, which we made out of metal pieces of old cars. And they are bent in a 90 degree angle with the overhang pointing downstream, because any gold running down, being so heavy, would fall under the exposed part of the angle. But the sand and gravel would wash right on down. We spent quite a while and a lot of blistered hands cutting these pieces of metal up and getting our sluice box going. And down in the lower half, we put in pieces of rugs and things like that to catch the fine gold. So the pump we bought down in L.A. and, we have to go back in time. 2
When we made the decision to go, well, we would go the following year, so our gold rush was in 1939, and the decision-making, planning and preparations were in 1938. During this lapse of time from 1938 to 1939, winter months, I bought a Model A rebuilt Ford motor from Montgomery Ward, and I had a good friend down in the machine shop and got him to make me a plate so we could set the transmission in backwards to get more speed out of it. 3
We got all that done and I got a leave of absence from where I was working. We loaded a trailer down with everything we thought we would need – tools and the motor, my Lakewood motor and a sewing machine and the company gear with the expectation of staying out there for at least a year. We had a camp stove with us and we took a lot of canned goods and stuff from the store and out we go – off we go to Californy-i-a.
My father was a young man, twenty-five-years-old, my mother was a young woman and they had a just barely five-year-old daughter and a dog. Times were hard. Parts of the country were pulling out of the Depression and the Dust Bowl, and jobs were scarce and highly coveted. There would probably be a hundred men waiting in line for my father’s job. Yet, he took (and they gave him!) a leave of absence and off we went. This decision, in-and-of-itself, says heaps about my family and who they were. Mother was just as excited for this adventure as my father was. They were willing to leave everything they had known, everyone who was near and dear to them, and strike out for parts unknown.
Our leaving must have been difficult for my grandparents, too. My Great-Grandmother Reed would be left alone – surrounded by friends and neighbors of course, but no family. Grandma and Grandpa Willey had each other and their three sons but Daddy was the oldest, the brightest and in many ways, the backbone of the family. Yet, the entire family supported the adventure, gave us what they could to help, and bid us a fond farewell. I find it curious that I do not remember the farewell. I remember the discussions and the decision-making, the preparations and the trip and I do not remember the farewell.
Mother would never say goodbye. She was very strong in her beliefs about that. She would only say “farewell” or “’til we meet again, another time, another place.” That was the Indian way.