By Carter Revard
My cousin Roy Camp was one of the better
watermelon-stealers in our part of the country, between Pawhuska and Buck
Creek--or at least he told the best stories about when the farmers really DID
use rock salt in the shotgun, and he once went around for days unable to sleep
on his back or even sit down because he got peppered with some of it one
afternoon. Sixty years later, when I was
out in California visiting with him and his family, we got to talking about
some of those good old bad old days, so after I was back in St. Louis, in June
1996, it was time to write Winning the Dust
Bowl for Roy, who as is said in the poem had taught me to read back in
1936. He had lived with us that whole
year, out in the Buck Creek Valley, because not long before his father had been
beaten to death in the Pawhuska jail (Roy had tried to pull the policemen off
as they dragged his father through the doors).
When his mother remarried, Roy did not at first like the new stepfather;
so the year my twin sister and I started to Buck Creek School he lived and went
to school with us.
Three years later--as Steinbeck was
writing The Grapes of Wrath--Roy and a
buddy hopped a freight train and rode out to California to join his mother and
stepfather at a sawmill near Truckee, up by Lake Tahoe. A few years later he married a good strong
woman, served in the Marines in World War Two, then saw to it that his mother
Loretta had a good house right near where he and Celestine located in
Porterville. When I visited them for
Roy's seventieth birthday and went down to the local mall for a birthday
dinner, we couldn't move twenty feet along a sidewalk or an aisle without
people greeting him with a big grin and handshake or hug. So when I wrote this I wanted to remind
Welfare Kings like certain governors and presidents that the food on their
table is put there not only by "immigrants" but also by
"natives"--people looked down on by those in power, even as they hand
rich contributors largesse from the banks and businesses and porkbarrels made
possible by the Okies, Indians, Chicanos, Koreans, Blacks, Hmongs, Vietnamese
and probably even a few capitalistic Brits and Ayrabs and Noo Yawkers out there
in LaLaLand.
WINNING THE
DUST BOWL
There was a reaching up
into the dusty leaves
after
the biggest most golden
ones, and almost
falling off the
ladder--stretching up into
the stiff pungent leaves,
on through
dead twigs, brushy
branches where my fingers
just barely touched,
touched and tipped
a heavy orb till with one
last touch it
dropped upon my palm--
deep gold with greeny
tinges, warm to fingers
closing despite the
ladder's shaking--
and then a turning
cautiously on rungs to toss
that last tree-ripened
navel orange into
the sure and waiting hands
below
of my cousin Roy--and the climbing down
to the solid loamy ground
of his back yard
behind the house he built
at the edge
of Porterville, by now
just fringing the upper
middle class's brick and
well-coiffed
development houses built
over orange groves
and olive trees where as
he says
if he and Celestine could
have saved a little more from
their migrant Okie labor
up and down this Gold Rush State
and further, from the
Salton Sea's tomatoes all the way up
to Oregon's cherries,
Washington's apples, all that
stoop labor, ladder
aches, labor camps, sometimes
our Ponca cousins working
alongside--as he says,
a little more in the
savings bank and maybe
some twenty acres bought
at the edge of Porterville
when land was still dirt
cheap
would have made him a millionaire
where now the bankers,
lawyers, heads of
businesses live, as well as the doctor
from Pakistan who
diagnosed his pancreatic cancer--but then
what's in THEIR yards is
ornamental, flowers briefly,
looks beautiful but not
for eating, what's on
their tables grows on
some other field
of earth where Others
work, and here
are these tree-ripened
oranges, navels and
Valencias, in Roy's back
yard. I can't wait, we peel
and eat two big ones
bursting with juice
and sweetness, then we
wipe our hands
and mouths and he puts
into a plastic grocery
bag two dozen dusty globes
for me to take back down
to Pasadena, and walking back
toward the house we stop
for onions,
enormous purple ones he's
just dug up,
we find some ties and
string the onions up to dry,
we look at the green
tomatoes in their mini-jungle there
in his garden plot, the
peppers, okra just poking up,
see where small apricot
and peach trees now have bloomed,
and then past his window
cooler that he built
and hooked up specially
to a backyard hydrant here
(last night, cool breezes
from it helped me sleep),
we see the huge rose-tree
still in bloom and he pauses there
before its great crimson
depths and fragrance and says quietly
that this was given by a
friend before he died
who said he hoped that
when it bloomed
they'd have good thoughts
of him,
which, as Roy said, they
surely do, and then
Celestine came out the
front door past the amaryllis
with its humongous
scarlet blooms and we walked
to my car, opened the
trunk and flumped
the oranges in their
plastic bag into its depths and slammed the lid
and we hugged and said we
hoped
that next year on his
seventy-second birthday
we'd have some more
strawberries over angelfood
with whipped cream like
Celestine had just fixed for us--
"You realize,
Mike," he'd said,
"these aren't my
strawberries--we
bought those a couple
blocks away at that fruit stand
in the corner of that big
strawberry field,
three dollars for what
seems like half a bushel
from that Hmong family
who run the stand--if all
those Hmongs the
government's bringing in here now
would work like them I'd
never object
to all the government's
doing for them
and never did for
us."So we had talked a little
about Viet Nam, and what
we owed
the people we had used to
kill and save our empire,
and what the Okies of the
Dust Bowl times,
Roy and Celestine and our
families,
had done for
California--but now
when I closed the
trunk-lid and we hugged
and said good-bye for
this year and who knows
how long, it wasn't Hmong
and Okie,
Mexican, Black or Indian,
but just the three of us now--
a cousin like an older
brother who'd taught me to read
in the first grade,
the beautiful woman he
had married
when he had joined the
Marines and might have gone
down on Tarawa in the
South Pacific,
and me, the academic
Osage Okie out for a visit.
"Now listen,
Mike," Roy said, and I could tell
my getting lost in a different
way,
each time I came to
Porterville, was on his mind,
"the only thing you
have to do to reach the highway
is turn right, right down
where I'm pointing,
and follow that all the
way." And so I did,
never got lost and drove
right down
past orange groves,
English walnuts and olives,
past Bakersfield and
oilwells pumping,
down Highway Ninety-Nine
with its rose azalea blooming, on
into Pasadena where I had
some work
on medieval manuscripts
to do
at the Huntington
Library, on that huge estate
the railroad magnate
bought when land
was dirt cheap, built his
mansion there, acquired
the Earl of Bridgewater's
manuscripts and planted
a lot of cactus, made a
Japanese Garden,
a Shakespeare Garden,
built
an Art Museum, made a big
Foundation--
or should I say he hired
a lot of workmen and they
did it for him? It may have been
on Mister Huntington's
railroads that my cousin Roy
was riding, in or under
boxcars, four years after his dad
was beaten to death in
the Pawhuska jail, and Roy
rode freezing out to
California and made a way
to put good food on many
tables and to build
a family, house, a life
with friends, children,
grandchildren, fellow
fishermen who laugh and know
what it's like to catch
and let them go, and
stretch the truth only
enough to make it
credible.
Meanwhile, for academics
the Huntington's
a gorgeous place to work,
whole gardens full
of roses named for people
who all hope
we'll have good thoughts
of them when they bloom,
and there are many
Friends of the Huntington
who surely do.
Copyright
© Carter Revard. All rights reserved.
Carter
Revard, Osage on his father's side, was born in the Osage Agency town of
Pawhuska, Oklahoma and grew up on the Osage Reservation there. He attended a one-room school in the Buck
Creek rural community, won a radio quiz scholarship to the University of Tulsa,
and was given his Osage name in 1952, the year he went to Oxford University on
a Rhodes Scholarship. After taking his
B.A. there, he earned a Ph.D. at Yale and taught medieval literature,
linguistics, and American Indian literature at Amherst College, Washington
University St. Louis, and elsewhere. He
retired in 1997 but continues to write and publish poems and scholarly
essays. His books of poetry include
Ponca War Dancers (1980), Cowboys and Indians, Christmas Shopping (1992), An
Eagle Nation (1993), and How The Songs Come Down (2005). A collection of essays published in 1998,
Family Matters, Tribal Affairs, was followed by Winning The Dust Bowl (memoirs
and poems) in 2001. Some recent poems, including "Deer Mice Singing Up
Parnassus," appear in AHANI Sing: Poems of the Indigenous Americas, edited by Allison Hedge Coke, from The
University of Arizona Press.