Broadway, the main street that runs through the center of Okemah, lives up to its name. It seems about as wide as the westbound half of the Santa Monica Freeway. Downtown Okemah would certainly feel more intimate if the street were narrower. Maybe there’s a historical reason it’s so wide—to accommodate cattle drives or large farm equipment—I don’t know. On an ordinary day this too-big-for-its-britches stretch of pavement would have added to the town’s sense of emptiness and desolation, but we had, by sheer luck, arrived in Okemah on no ordinary day.
This farming and ranching town of 3,200 sits right off Interstate 40, about an hour east of Oklahoma City and a little more than an hour west of Sallisaw. Sallisaw is where the Joad family, fleeing the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression for California, begin their journey, one that would have taken them right through Okemah, in John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath.
We came here to pay my respects to Okemah’s most famous son, America’s greatest folk singer and folk-song writer, Woody Guthrie.
John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie were both extraordinary chroniclers of the Dust Bowl, Steinbeck in prose and Guthrie in song. When The Grapes of Wrath was made into a film by John Ford in 1940, Guthrie was in New York City and on the cusp of major celebrity, making his first commercial recording for Victor Records, The Dust Bowl Ballads.* According to Guthrie biographer Joe Klein, Victor asked Guthrie to write a song that would capitalize on the film’s popularity and thus the song Tom Joad, named for Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath protagonist, was written.† Guthrie had lived the Dust Bowl experience and was, therefore, the perfect balladeer to write such a song.
Steinbeck and Guthrie met several times and were kindred spirits and mutual admirers of each other’s work. In a 2008 interview, Steinbeck’s son Thom told The Fog City Journal, a San Francisco-based publication, there was a “spiritual oneness” in the two, especially in their shared concern for the plight of common people, the downtrodden and the marginalized, a theme that defined the works of both men. Anyone who reads Steinbeck’s dialogue in his many novels and listens to Guthrie’s lyrics or reads his prose (Guthrie authored two books himself, an autobiography and a novel) will also be struck by similarities in the vernacular.‡
Routing ourselves through Guthrie’s hometown of Okemah also meant that we would be traveling clear to the California line on roughly the same route as the Joad family and hundreds of thousands of others who escaped the Dust Bowl for what they hoped would be a land of milk and honey. The Joads followed the famed Route 66 all the way from Oklahoma to California, but that’s impossible these days. Only remnants of the old Route 66 remain. Much of it, though still formally designated “66,” is one and the same road as Interstate 40. Once we got to Amarillo, just a day’s drive from Okemah, we’d also be back on Steinbeck’s trail, for he and Charley also paralleled the Joad’s route between California and Amarillo, though they did so from west to east.
The Dust Bowl was a staggering disaster wrought by the hand of man and the whimsy of nature. As the Great Plains were settled, farmers stripped the rich topsoil of the natural grasses that literally held the land in place. More than one hundred million acres were affected by over-farming and overgrazing. When a crushing multiyear drought hit, a drought that coincided with the Great Depression, the exposed topsoil turned to dust.
Great clouds of dust, “black blizzards” blown up and carried by prairie winds over hundreds of miles billowed, sometimes nearly two miles high, and rolled over towns, driving fine particles of dirt into every nook and cranny of even the most tightly secured homes. Some of the dust settled as far east as New York City. Nothing grew. Money dried up with the soil and untold human misery ensued. As hundreds of thousands fled in search, literally, of greener pastures, most headed west in overloaded jalopies for California, a land that took root in the popular imagination as so fertile, and so rich, as to be beyond imagining.§
As Albie and I made our way from Oklahoma to California we would be traveling in the footsteps, or more precisely the tire tracks, of countless desperate migrants who passed this way in the 1930s. We were traveling in comfort and style, however, and with none of the worries that weighed them down like the household belongings that made their jalopy springs sag under the weight. In no meaningful way would our journey across this part of the United States be remotely similar to theirs except for the rough outlines of the scenery. But one could, at least, appreciate the immense sadness, hopefulness, and eventual heartbreaking disappointment of their odysseys.
Spirits lifted by rumors that jobs in the rich fields of California awaited any man or woman who wanted to work were crushed by the reality that there were far more people making their way west in hope of finding work than could possibly be employed. This was a deliberate strategy by growers and middlemen with contracts to harvest the fields to ensure that a massive labor pool of people would work backbreaking hours under a hot sun for next to nothing. And as the destitute “Okies” (a derogatory epithet) would discover, they were looked down upon as barely human, and ruthlessly exploited. They gathered in makeshift encampments of shared misery called Hoovervilles, after the president presiding over the Great Depression. To keep these “undesirables” moving down the road, sheriff’s deputies often torched the camps at night.
When Steinbeck’s Joad family reached Needles, California, on the Arizona border, they encountered a stranger as they basked in the cool water of a stream near the highway. They assumed he was, like them, escaping the Dust Bowl. But he was headed in the opposite direction, back home to Pampa, Oklahoma.¶
“S’pose a fella got work an’ saved, couldn’ he get a little lan’?” Tom Joad asks the stranger.
“You ain’t gonna get no steady work,” the stranger replies. “Gonna scrabble for your dinner ever’ day. An’ you gonna do her with people lookin’ mean at you.”
Hundreds of thousands found out the hard way that the promise of California was just a mirage. To keep migrants out, the state of California started turning people away at the border, a storyline memorialized by Woody Guthrie in the song “Do Re Mi,” one of his Dust Bowl Ballads. (The “do re mi,” refers, of course, to money.) The song was a warning to migrants that California might not be the answer to their dreams.
Lots of folks back East, they say, is leavin' home every day,
Beatin' the hot old dusty way to the California line.
'Cross the desert sands they roll, gettin' out of that old dust bowl,
They think they're goin' to a sugar bowl, but here's what they find
Now, the police at the port of entry say,
"You're number fourteen thousand for today."
Oh, if you ain't got the do re mi, folks, you ain't got the do re mi,
Why, you better go back to beautiful Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee.
California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see;
But believe it or not, you won't find it so hot
If you ain't got the do re mi.
According to Thom Steinbeck, his father once joked to Guthrie in a letter that if only he’d written “Do Re Mi” earlier, it would have saved Steinbeck the trouble of writing The Grapes of Wrath. Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck captured the struggles and the merciless exploitation of these decent, hardworking Americans as few others ever have, and that, in large part, is at the root of my admiration for both of them.
About six weeks before we started our trip, I e-mailed the Okemah Historical Society to see if they could suggest someone knowledgable about the Guthrie family history in town who might be willing to meet Albie and me and show us around. After a week or so there’d been no reply. I tried a second time, but again no response. So, I called, and a nice, older woman told me I should talk to a society volunteer named Wayland Bishop. I scribbled the name down on a scrap of paper. She took my number and promised to have him call me. More than a week passed and no call, so I called again, and spoke with the same woman. She had given my name and number to Wayland and promised to give him another message. We were about to leave in a week but there was still no word from Wayland Bishop. Indeed, I never did hear from him. I didn’t want to make a pest of myself so I dropped it and figured when we got to Okemah I’d just show myself around. Using my fifty-year-old copy of Woody’s autobiography, Bound for Glory, I’d try to identify some of the spots where Guthrie spent his youth. Before we left home, however, I searched all over for the scrap of paper with Wayland’s name on it because I figured I’d ask around for him while we were there, but it was nowhere to be found and for the life of me I could not remember his name.
I’d never set foot in Oklahoma, one of only four states I’d never visited, and all of which we would pass through on this trip. (The others being North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Michigan.) Paris, Texas, where we’d spent the previous night, is only about twenty miles from the Oklahoma border, and we were in the Sooner State before we knew it.
The Indian Nation Turnpike is a pleasant toll road that runs from the Texas border, through lands that once belonged to the Choctaw and Creek Indians, and up to I-40 across broad, gentle, tree-covered hills. Once on I-40, Okemah was just another ten miles or so west.
Frankly, I wasn’t expecting to spend much more than an hour or two in Okemah. Wayland’s name continued to elude me, and it was a Saturday, when the Historical Society was almost sure to be closed. It would probably be dead quiet in this small town. Woody had grown up in a house known as the London House, as the previous owners were the Londons, and I thought it would be a victory of sorts if we could just locate the place where the house once stood.#
We parked just before we hit Broadway because the street was blocked off with sawhorses and police tape. Something was going on in town; we could see a lot of people milling about. Albie and I walked the block and a half to Broadway and saw that we had, just as we had the day before in Hughes Springs, stumbled onto a carnival with rides and food stands and various businesses and civic groups with their tables and awnings set up along the street. Albie woofed at the ponies walking in small circles with little children perched on their backs.
The action was concentrated at the east end of Broadway; the westerly end, near the fire station, was practically deserted save for a lone woman sitting at a table in front of Warn’s, a furniture store, and another woman across the street in front of a business called “Faith (family owned and operated), Fitness (group fitness and self-defense) and Firearms (guns and ammo, gun range).” Many storefronts were empty and the buildings vacant, some apparently for years.
We passed a table staffed by a local school group and asked the kids if they knew where the London House used to be, “You know, the house where Woody Guthrie grew up.” They had no idea. It wasn’t even clear if they knew who Woody Guthrie was. I thanked them, and Albie and I continued walking down Broadway.
A miniature schnauzer pulled on his leash, eager to meet Albie. As the two dogs got acquainted the way dogs do, by sniffing one another’s private parts, I got acquainted with the couple at the other end of the leash the way humans do, by introducing myself. The man was wearing a badge on his shirt bearing the name of his real estate business and his name: Carl Alls. I told Carl and his wife we’d come to Okemah from Boston to pay tribute to Woody Guthrie.**
“Oh,” said Carl, “then you need to talk to Wayland Bishop.”
Wayland Bishop! The name I’d written down but lost and then forgot.
“He’s right over here. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”
What luck! We’d been in town all of five minutes and I’d already found the man I would have been looking for had I remembered his name. Without my realizing it, we were standing practically in front of the Historical Society and Wayland was right there, out front on the sidewalk.
“This fella’s looking for you,” Carl said to Wayland. I introduced myself and Wayland immediately apologized for not getting back to me. He’s a tall, trim man in his late sixties, raised in Okemah and now retired there after a career in the tire industry in Oklahoma City. He’s been back for ten years.
Wayland invited me into the Historical Society to see a treasure trove of Woody memorabilia on display: record albums, a guitar, family photos, high school yearbooks he had signed, and a partial reconstruction of the London House made from wood salvaged from the original structure.
“Woody left town is his mid-teens, but he often came back here whenever he was close,” Wayland told me. “He’d be riding the rails or hitchhiking and usually came to a bar owned by his childhood friend, Colonel Martin. That was a nickname. No one knows why he was called Colonel. Woody would sleep in the back of the Colonel’s garage, have breakfast with the Martins, and move on. He would just walk off. He just came and went.
“My dad says he thinks Woody never bothered to bathe,” Wayland added. “Some folks would invite him for a meal but insist he bathe first while they washed his clothes.”
Wayland was the first of many people we met in Okemah who would recall the time the actor David Carradine came to town; he played Woody Guthrie in the 1976 film Bound for Glory, based on Woody’s autobiography. It was a big deal.
Wayland told us we’d arrived in Okemah on Pioneer Day, a celebration that’s the biggest event in town all year except for the annual Woody Guthrie Festival (referred to as Woody Fest), a multiday music festival held on the July weekend closest to Woody’s birthday, July 14. The first Woody Fest was held in 1997 to commemorate the life and music of Okemah’s most famous native son. Pioneer Day also coincides with a multiyear class reunion for graduates of Okemah High School. This year it included, among others, the classes of 1968 to 1972, and hundreds of people who now lived away were here for the homecoming. I’m a 1971 high school graduate myself, and many of the people out and about on Broadway this day were my contemporaries. Before the day was out Albie and I would practically become honorary members of the Okemah High School alumni association.
Okemah didn’t always celebrate Woody Guthrie’s legacy; far from it. When the idea first surfaced in the late 1960s that Okemah should recognize Woody’s life and music there was powerful opposition. Business leaders and local politicians thought the town’s association with a man who embraced aspects of socialism and communism, and once wrote for The Daily Worker, a publication of the Communist Party USA, would be a stain on the community; that far from drawing tourists and their dollars, good people would shun Okemah and only hippies and “undesirables” would come to see a Guthrie memorial. Woody’s political leanings were so toxic that when he died in 1967, the Okemah Public Library refused a gift of his songs and writings. Woody wanted to be buried in the town where he’d been born but his widow, Marjorie, angered by the library’s refusal, had his ashes scattered in the Atlantic instead.
The controversy over Woody’s legacy attracted national media attention. A 1972 article in Rolling Stone quoted the then president of the local chamber of commerce, Allison Kelly, as saying the paramount issue was whether “Okemah should honor a communist.” That same year, a service station owner in town told the New York Times, “Woody was no good. About half the town feels that way. I knew him, went to school with him, used to whup him. He doesn’t deserve to have his name up there.” “Up there” referred to a water tower that had recently been painted with the words, “Home of Woody Guthrie.” It still stands today.
But there were others, who were also powerful people in town, and felt Woody had, through song, made a huge impact on the world and ought to be recognized. One was Earl Walker, a leading officer in the Oklahoma/Texas chapter of Kiwanis, who bought the old London House in 1972 for $7,000 with plans (never realized) to rebuild and restore it and turn it into a center for displaying Woody’s writings and music. It was Walker who successfully led the effort to get the water board to honor Guthrie on the water tower,†† and, thirty years before the first ever Woody Fest in 1997, Walker traveled to visit Woody in the hospital in New York to see if he would approve of efforts Walker and others were making to honor him in Okemah. He did, and gave Walker a signed copy of his autobiography, Bound for Glory. Woody died shortly thereafter.
“People fear that putting up a memorial to Woody would attract hordes of motorcycle riders who would cruise through the town and threaten everybody,” Walker told Rolling Stone in 1972. “But for every motorcycle rider, there would be 50 or 100 other persons who would stop and maybe bring a little business our way.”
But Walker’s motivation was more than financial. He was, perhaps, just slightly more progressive than many of his neighbors. In 1972, the year he bought the London House, he helped found the Woody Guthrie Memorial, Inc., a nonprofit organization.
“This time,” he told Rolling Stone, “we are going to get some muscle behind us and make sure we get a memorial to Woody. Woody was no communist, he was an individual who believed strongly in some things. I don’t necessarily agree with everything he did, but I don’t question his right to do so. Hell, look at what Hannibal, Missouri, did with Mark Twain, and he was an atheist.”
“Were it not for Earl Walker,” the New York Times reported in 1972, “the memories [of Guthrie] might have lain dormant.”
Still, it took more than two decades for Okemah to come around to fully embracing its native son. Wayland Bishop was one of several people we met in Okemah who told me that as the older generation aged and died off and a younger generation came of age, attitudes softened.
“Woody’s politics are not important to people here anymore,” Wayland told me. “They just know he was for the people. People here were oppressed, and they’re still oppressed. They just care about the fact that Woody was for the people and they respect that he became a renowned songwriter, though when he was young and playing the guitar on the street here for change, hardworking ranch folks didn’t think that what he was doing was work.
“I was a union man,” added Wayland, perhaps thinking of Woody’s commitment to the working man and the labor movement. “I worked for Firestone Tire and was a member of the Rubber Workers Union, which became part of the Iron Workers. This is a poor town, but when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties, every storefront was occupied. Then the interstate came through in 1963 and later Walmart and it killed all the retail. We don’t even have a clothing store in town anymore.”
As we talked inside the Historical Society a friendly, nice-looking man in shorts, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap approached us, and Wayland introduced me to Kurtis Walker. Kurtis is the grandson of Earl Walker. Wayland introduced me as “a Woody fan.”
“We can tell,” Kurtis said good-naturedly. “Like you, people come here, not just from the United States but from all over the world, because of Woody, and they are just looking around trying to take it all in.”
Kurtis is an open, gregarious man in his midforties and now owns the lot where the London House once stood, the lot his grandfather bought in 1972. He offered to walk us over there after the Pioneer Day parade that was scheduled for midday.
Albie and I continued hanging out on the sidewalk in front of the Historical Society; it seemed to be the center of a lot of the action. Just in front of us, on the street, Kurtis was one of several volunteers working a table set up to publicize and raise funds for a project to restore three old water towers that stand side by side in town. One is painted with the words “Hot Okemah,” another “Cold Okemah,” and the third is the one his grandfather succeeded in having painted “Home of Woody Guthrie.” Like his grandfather Earl before him, Kurtis is doing his part to honor Woody’s memory and better the town.
Wayland and Kurtis kept introducing Albie and me to people, some current residents, others back from afar for their high school reunion, explaining that we were on a cross-country car trip and had come to Okemah because of Woody. And those folks, in turn, introduced us to still others so that before long it felt like we’d met half the people who had ever lived in town in the past sixty years or so. Everyone greeted us with genuine kindness.
Some even heard about us and came over because they had something they wanted to tell us, like 87-year-old Mary Coleman, walking with the help of a cane and wearing a purple cowboy hat, a purple vest, and an ankle-length black skirt. She told me there’s an open mic event at the start of every Woody Fest and that she and her 90-year-old brother, Earl “Buddy” Williams, play together, she on guitar (she’s self-taught) and Buddy on fiddle and mandolin.
“I can’t imagine who wants to hear a nearly 90-year-old woman play,” she told me, “but Buddy never misses a note!”
“What kinds of songs do you play?” I asked.
“Oh, ‘San Antonio Rose’ and other old songs,” she replied. “‘This Land is Your Land’ is my favorite. My mother knew the Guthries, but we lived in the country eight miles from here by Buckeye Creek, so I didn’t know them.” Almost everyone we met in town had ancestors who knew the Guthries.
“I went to a one-room school there,” she continued. “We came here riding the Greyhound bus; nine kids in our family. We sold eggs and cream out of the back of a horse-drawn wagon. You’re from Boston someone said?”
“Yes,” I answered, “near Boston.” Word of our appearance had apparently spread like wildfire.
“My granddaughter teaches at MIT!” she proclaimed proudly. Then she came back to Woody. “Woody was always carrying his guitar, so my brother and I did the same, so we could play whenever. I teach guitar. Have a Gibson and taught all four of my kids music. I’m part Cherokee, you know.”
“How much Cherokee?” I asked.
“Very much!” Mary replied. “My hair was so black it was blue!”
And with that she started to amble away, but not before turning around to say one more thing. “Thank you!” she called out. “Thank you so much! Come back for the Woody Guthrie Festival!”
Wherever I looked there were old friends, many seeing one another for the first time in years, greeting each other, slapping backs, and embracing. Their warmth and affection for one another were palpable. All had the dust of this town in their bones.
Ed Stokes grew up here, but lives now in Katy, Texas, near Houston. He’s a year older than me and had come home for the class of 1970 reunion. He was wearing jeans and a collared shirt and a baseball-style cap. He has a huge smile, an easy manner, and is the kind of guy you can’t help but like from the moment he introduces himself and gives you a firm handshake and a laugh that seems to come from somewhere deep inside him. I took him to be a rancher, but he has spent his entire career with Conoco as a petroleum engineer. He lived and worked in Europe for fourteen years and spent considerable time in the Middle East, as well.
As he looked down Broadway he used exactly the same word to describe modern-day Okemah as Wayland Bishop had earlier: “disappointing.” He was referring to what’s happened to the thriving town of his childhood.
“There used to be ten supermarkets right here on Broadway,” he told me. He, too, mentioned the adverse impact of Walmart on the town. Then the talk turned to Woody.
“Used to be Pioneer Day was everything in this town. Now it’s the Woody Guthrie Festival,” Ed said. Earl Walker’s vision of an Okemah that fully wrapped its arms around Woody had come to pass.
“Back in the early 1970s, people here didn’t want to have anything to do with Woody Guthrie because he went to New York and became a socialist,” Ed, a self-described libertarian, told me. “When Arlo [Woody’s son, the singer Arlo Guthrie] came here in the late sixties to try and get the town to honor Woody, the older generation had a lot of bad feelings. But he wrote more than five hundred songs‡‡ and had a great influence on music and affected so many lives. He was world-renowned.”
As we talked Ed saw a classmate named Ginny to whom he quickly introduced me. “This here is Peter and Albie,” he said. “Traveled all the way from Boston.” Ginny is part Creek and part Cherokee and she and Ed spoke briefly in Creek.
“A lot of people here are part Indian,” Ed told me after Ginny had gone off to greet some other friends. Many of the people I met in Okemah, like Mary and Ginny, were either full-blooded Native Americans or of mixed white and Indian ancestry and everyone seemed to treat each other with kindness and respect. There’s been so much intermarriage over the generations that racial divisions between whites and Native Americans have ceased to be an issue here.
Pretty soon Ed was like my best old friend in this town.
“Hey, Pete, have you met Nokey?” There was also Bubby, Bobby, and Nubbin.
“I don’t even know some of their real names,” Ed said, his laugh nearly swallowing his words. “And I’ve known them all my life!”
Back inside the Historical Society there was a table set up with some cookies and soft drinks, and we fell into conversation with three women who were sitting inside. All appeared to be in their sixties or seventies. As usual, it was Albie who caught their eye and started the conversation among us. All had grown up here. In addition to Woody, they told me, Okemah had produced some other notable people. William Pogue became an astronaut and piloted Skylab 4. Larry Coker was once the head football coach at the University of Miami. His sister was one of the women I was talking with. DeLoss McGraw became an artist of considerable renown.
Pat Soledade, like Ed Stokes, was back in Okemah for the reunion. She, too, lives near Houston now. She attended Oklahoma University and later graduate school at Columbia. She joined the Peace Corps in the 1960s partly because the three-week training session was held in New York City and she wanted a look at the bright lights.
“I didn’t really intend to go into the Peace Corps,” Pat told me. “I just wanted to go to New York City. Imagine coming from here to New York City! I was out all the time.”
Pat did enter the Peace Corps and served in Brazil where she met her husband, a Brazilian man, while “dancing on a table during Carnival.” They raised their children in Brazil.
All of this surprised me, which tells you something about the biases I brought to Okemah with me. Here was this demure woman in her late seventies from Okemah, Oklahoma, and her life sounded like something out of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. Many of the people I was meeting were more worldly than I expected.
“I first came back to Okemah for my high school reunion in 1990,” Pat told me. “The entire town had become decrepit. It was a shock and I didn’t come back again for ten years. This is our sixtieth reunion and our class has stayed close. Some of us even travel together.”
I asked Pat about the town and its relationship to Woody and she echoed what others had told me.
“Woody Guthrie was persona non grata here for a long time,” she said. “This county lost a lot of people during the Korean War and people couldn’t stand the idea of this left-wing person being honored. But time passes.”
The front door to the Historical Society opened and Ed Stokes took a step inside.
“Hey, Pete!” he called out. “Come on, the parade is starting!”
Kurtis Walker had come inside, too, and as Ed headed back out for the parade Kurtis said to me, “You see how friendly people are here. There’s no reason to be friendly unless you care about people. People here really care about each other.”
It’s true. Everyone had a nice word for Albie and for me in Okemah. They also seemed to appreciate that we’d stopped to see their town and that I knew a lot about Woody. I had expected to come into town, walk some relatively abandoned streets, take a few pictures, and leave. By late afternoon we were still there.
Back out on Broadway, Kurtis introduced me to Lance Warn, still youthful-looking at almost eighty years old, who used to own Warn’s, the furniture store I’d seen earlier. Warn had been president of the chamber of commerce during some of the years when the controversy over Woody raged in town.
“The older generation, the city fathers, the bankers, they just put the kibosh on it,” Lance told me. “They just shut it down. A generation passed, and the younger generation didn’t care about Woody’s politics. They saw the potential of honoring his legacy and then things really moved.” Warn pointed across the street toward the Citizens State Bank.
“There used to be a supermarket next door,” he told me, “and between the market and bank there was an alley where my father used to shoot marbles with Woody.”
Lance mentioned that up by the fire station there was a section of sidewalk where Woody had carved his name while the cement was still wet nearly a century ago. Kurtis was about to walk me over to the London House property, but I wanted to see if we could find Woody’s name in the sidewalk first. Albie and I walked the few hundred yards up to the firehouse and paced up and down the sidewalk but saw nothing. A few of the firemen had a grill going outside and I asked if they knew where Woody had etched his name in the sidewalk. One of them led me inside the firehouse and called for a colleague. A young, solidly built man came to the front. As I explained what I was looking for, he turned and lifted a large piece of old cement sidewalk off a shelf.
“When I was replacing the sidewalk a little while ago I drilled this piece out,” he explained.
There, clear as day, was a name: “Woody.” It was as if we were looking at the fossil of a small dinosaur. It was thrilling to see it and hold it, this physical link connecting me to one of my heroes.
Kurtis had wandered up and as we began walking back down Broadway toward the London House lot we ran into Kurtis’s father, William Earl Walker, Jr. The senior Mr. Walker was dressed as many men usually are in this part of the country—jeans, cowboy boots, cap, and a long-sleeve, button-down shirt—even though it was about ninety degrees. William Walker lives in Moore, which is sandwiched between Oklahoma City and Norman. Moore was familiar because the town was severely damaged with significant loss of life by two F-5 tornadoes, in 1999 and 2013, and both tragedies received national media attention.
Kurtis said we were at the peak of tornado season in Oklahoma (it was late April). No one could remember there not being a tornado this late in the season but so far this year, nothing. I’ve had a morbid fascination with tornadoes since watching The Wizard of Oz as a kid and thought it would be awe-inspiring to see one from a distance, but Mr. Walker’s harrowing stories of the Moore tornadoes made me reconsider. Kurtis said goodbye to his dad, who was heading back to Moore, and told him he loved him.
As we walked, Kurtis and Albie and I were alone for the first time all day, though we’d been chatting on and off for several hours. Almost immediately Kurtis said something that took me aback.
“I’m like the gay black guy in this town,” he said to me in a conspiratorial whisper.
Okay, I thought, what does that mean?
“I’m a liberal,” he added immediately. I breathed a sigh of relief. Not because he was a liberal but because some of the other interpretations of his comment were too dark to contemplate. Kurtis had made an assumption about me, perhaps because I was from Massachusetts, just as I had about him. He’d told me earlier he’d been deployed to Iraq in 2004 as a member of the U.S. Army Reserve (Charlie Company, 120th Engineers), in which he has served for twenty years, and since we were deep in the heart of Trump country I assumed he was pretty conservative. My assumption was wrong. His was right.
“What’s it like to be a liberal in such a conservative town?” I asked.
“Well, people know me here. I grew up here, so they don’t judge me by my politics,” he said. “I have friends that I just avoid politics with; some are tolerant and some are kindred spirits.”
We shared our dismay and disbelief over the current president, but the conversation quickly turned to other matters. Kurtis is the divorced father of two, raising the kids pretty much on his own. To make ends meet, in addition to his work in the army reserve, he works part-time for the post office and teaches some basic engineering classes at a local technical school. He’s working on opening a pizza place in town.
The lot where the London House, Woody’s childhood home, once stood was overgrown and Kurtis said something about needing to come back and mow it. It’s not entirely vacant, however. There are remnants of the old stone foundation and some stone steps leading to what was once the front porch. Rising from the middle of the lot is the trunk of an old cedar tree, out of which someone very skillfully carved the words “This Land Is Your Land” on one side and beneath that a few notes on a musical staff. On the other side, from top to bottom, were carved a guitar, the initials “WG,” and the word “Okemah.”
“Who did that?” I asked Kurtis, thinking it was something official.
He pointed to the house across the street. “The guy who lives over there,” he said, referring to a sculptor named Justin Osborn.
There’s a vacant lot next to the London House lot and Kurtis owns that, too. It slopes down toward the street Osborn lives on. He imagines building a small amphitheater on it someday where people can play and listen to music. Build it and they will come, I thought to myself.
“What would you need to make that happen?” I asked.
“Money,” he answered. “I don’t have the money.”
As we started walking back toward town Kurtis said, “Come on, let me buy you a beer.”
“Let me buy you a beer,” I said as we arrived at Lou’s Rocky Road Tavern. “You’ve been really generous with your time.”
He refused. “That’s just not the way it works around here,” he said smiling.
Out back of Lou’s there’s a large fenced outdoor space filled with tables and umbrellas, a bar, and a small stage for performers. I was surprised. It felt more like a hangout for young urban professionals than a place for ranchers, farmers, and dozens of Okemahns home for their high school reunion.
We sat ourselves at the edge of the stage, which sits just a few inches above the ground. Kurtis came back with beers for us and, thoughtfully, a bowl of water for Albie. There were pictures hanging on the stage wall behind us, pictures of people who had performed here, including Jackson Browne and the late Jimmy LeFave. Kurtis pointed to one of the pictures and asked, “Know who that is?” It was a picture of another of my heroes, the folk singer Pete Seeger.
The bar manager, Gary, came over and Kurtis introduced us. He and his partner are openly gay in this very conservative town.
“It’s not an issue at all for people here,” said Kurtis later. “But it’s an evolution and Gary had a lot to do with it. People got to know him for the quality of person he is, not his sexual preference.”
Okemah was challenging a lot of my preconceptions.
Sitting closest to us was a table of four, but it was hard to figure out how they were connected, if at all. There was a big guy—a very big guy—tall, solidly built, wearing a sleeveless T and sporting a dark growth of beard and a full Fu-Man-Chu moustache, and a woman next to him who seemed to be his companion. Across the table was a very wiry, silent man of indeterminate age. His face was deeply lined and weathered and the beer he was drinking and the cigarette he was smoking appeared to be the millionth in a lifetime of hard living. He had no teeth. When he got up to go to the bar, jeans tucked into his cowboy boots, he wobbled to the point where it appeared he was simply going to topple over. The fourth at the table looked a little less worse for wear than his friend, but like everyone else at the table he was smoking. A cell phone, decorated with a Confederate flag, protruded from his shirt pocket.
When I asked Kurtis if this part of Oklahoma was the South or the West, he didn’t hesitate. “The South,” he said.
The couple turned in their seats to have a look at Albie. As usual Albie was the conversation starter. They wanted to know his name, how old he was and where we were from. They were boisterous, but well meaning. I doubt I’d have felt that way had I not been with Kurtis who seemed to know everyone here though I only learned later he didn’t know them.
Somehow the talk came around to my being a writer and the woman, clearly inebriated, said, “It’s nice to hear someone who sounds intelligent around here,” which certainly didn’t reflect well on her immediate company. “We don’t get much of that.” That brought forth a roar of laughter from her companion whom she’d just insulted, though perhaps unintentionally.
“Yep, we’re just a bunch of dumb Okies!” he roared.
“Yup, just bunch of dumb Okies!” she said laughing.
Had I been there alone I would have assumed this was their way of mocking me for what they thought was running through my head, and it might have been a signal they were spoiling for a fight. But they weren’t.
I muttered something feckless about there being many types of intelligence. It was the best I could come up with on the spot.
“That’s true!” said the woman. “There’s common sense!”
Though said as a joke, the “dumb Okie” remark seemed to reveal something deeply disturbing. It betrayed a sense of inferiority, of smallness, and it troubled me. I would be up half the night that night turning this brief interaction over and over in my head. Though said in jest, it had made me uncomfortable nonetheless. Just by being there, my presence had elicited a harsh self-assessment on their part. Is this what they really believed people like me thought of people like them? And, if so, were they wrong? So much has been written and said about the rise of a con man like Trump being a backlash against the coastal elites condescending to Middle America. Maybe Trump, for all his narcissism and gratuitous cruelty, was their voice, even as he shamelessly exploited all their fears and resentments. By giving the middle finger to everyone who ever turned up their nose at a “dumb Okie,” perhaps he was, in his perverse way, validating their existence.
Like so many other towns we’d already seen, and others we would see as our journey continued, Okemah is a poor place, a shell of its former self, a town largely left behind and forgotten. I wondered if there wasn’t something condescending about my mere presence here, as if these people were just raw material for my book.
Though these thoughts nagged at me, no one we met in Okemah seemed to feel that way or respond to me other than with genuine warmth. Many, like Mary, the elderly guitar player in the purple cowboy hat, conveyed a sense of gratitude that we’d taken the time and made the effort to come to their town, even for a day, to see the place they called home, and to value their stories.
Nothing learned on this trip would be more profound than this: people, no matter where they live, no matter how small or remote their hometown, just want someone to know them, to appreciate who they are and where they come from. To be known is to not be forgotten or overlooked. It is to be somebody. And in towns like Okemah, fallen on hard times, the desire to be known, to not be invisible, may be especially keen.
Ed Stokes had urged me to stay that evening, to come to the class reunion barbeque being held at the end of Broadway. But this was not my town, and these were not my classmates, and it was only right that we not overstay our welcome. The people of Okemah, in just eight hours, had already showered us with all kinds of generosity. There was much to think about as we continued westward to Norman for the night.
When we arrived at our motel that evening, I had an e-mail from Kurtis. “Stay with us (visiting us and getting to know us) and you’ll be an honorary member of the community,” he wrote. “It just works that way around here.”