1724 S. Trenton Ave.
Tulsa, Oklahoma

By Michael Helsem

“Everything, including dreams, is meteorological.” – R. A. Lafferty, ”Narrow Valley”

A couple of years ago, my wife and I were visiting my young niece and her husband in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where they had moved — a place I had never been. At first all I could think of was that immense, windswept plain, many times traversed by me, with speeding wheels, with wings, never stopping, the very incarnation of a blur. Then it dawned on me that the science fiction author R. A. Lafferty, whom I had idolized in the ‘70s), had spent almost his entire life in Tulsa. In the same house.

I had no luck finding any of his books in a bookstore there to show them, but at one point we were out on a walk, and I had summoned up from the Internet a not-quite-exact location of the house he had lived in. According to Natasha Ball on “Lafferty Lost and Found,” the house is “a shaded brick bungalow where Trenton comes to a T.” We went looking and found what seemed to be it, the corner house at 1724 S. Trenton Ave. I didn’t have a camera along, but it was satisfying to have seen it, anyway. It was a quiet, slightly gentrified neighborhood of older houses near a small lake, with good-sized trees on every block, which reminded me of the place in Oak Cliff I myself had grown up in — a good place to be a kid running wild on bicycles, where it seemed nothing bad could ever happen.

“Their brains differed from ours, their concepts must have been different, and therefore they lived in a different world.” – The Devil is Dead

Who is R. A. Lafferty, you may ask? He has fallen into obscurity but seems to be making a little bit of a comeback these days, praised by the likes of Neil Gaiman. To know him better, first run out and grab a copy of Nine Hundred Grandmothers. That’s a good start. Lafferty is best known for his inimitable short stories, which are only incidentally concerned with the tropes and themes of regular science fiction, and told in a jocular but slightly jarring voice that is a little like a tall tale and a little like a homegrown surrealist who has some really important things to say that he absolutely will not divulge, except in hints and sideways jokes. If you read enough of him, you start to dimly discern the vast, convoluted architecture of Lafferty’s universe—not an easy task, since so many of his books are out of print and not a few of them were published by small presses that never printed a large run in the first place.

To my understanding, there is a highly esoteric Thomist-Catholic aspect to it.  He apparently also believes we inhabit a multiverse in which time and space are sometimes illusory and sometimes not; survivals from the distant past (such as Neanderthals) or visitors from the future are not unheard of—and they’re not often used for the science-fictional story, they’re just THERE. He often makes reference to obviously bogus works, yet he’s also curiously erudite in real ones. There’s a wild Zen side, too, but you never can be quite sure when he’s being serious & when he’s pulling your leg.

“I was always for the underdog, and, doggy, you’re way way under.” – Fourth Mansions

It’s been said that aspects of the surrounding town are always seeping into his works, and not only the more ostensibly realist ones. But by and large, Tulsa is not present in any immediately named way — any more than the environs of the great mystical poets—unless you count the almost complete absence of that most-20c. experience: riding in a car (Lafferty didn’t drive). But two things I know. One is that Lafferty always identified with the underdog, the misfit, the underclass, and the socially disfavored; he has some striking stories and one historical novel (possibly his masterpiece, Okla Hannali) about Native Americans, whom he invariably credits with greater perception of reality.

In his many worlds, there is a pervasive, bone-deep precarity: the irruption of personal and/or apocalyptic violence is never out of the question, at any moment. I have to think the terrible 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, which happened about three miles from his house (although he was only seven at the time) must have been something he couldn’t not have known about and reflected on.

“We are living in the narrow interval between the lightning and the thunder.” – Arrive at Easterwine

And then there are the tornados — 98 since 1950, according to the National Weather Service. Idyllic the place might be, but hardly peaceful. On that particular, mild, sunny afternoon, we drove past two blocks of torn-up buildings that hadn’t yet been rebuilt, havoc from the last big one. It looked like a bomb had gone off, levelling everything; the car fell silent. You see such scenes in newsreel footage, latterly Ukraine maybe: never in these States, not like this. All the other cars kept right on rolling, on to their intended destinations, untroubled and I daresay sound of sleep. They raise their families, go to their neighborhood churches, my niece and her new husband among them. This is where they choose to live.

“We could always make another world,” said Welkin reasonably.
“Certainly, but this one is our testing.” – “Sky”

M. H. was born in Dallas in 1958. Shortly afterwards, fish fell from the sky.

Photo by Abby Boehning.

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Miner’s Shack

Picher, Oklahoma

By Joe Schiller

The shacks huddled haphazard and crosswise, scattered between the chat piles. Leaky roofs, knotholes, and loose-swinging doors let the dust in on any decent breeze. In Picher, Oklahoma, nobody built for permanence. They leased their plots from the biggest mining companies or from the Bureau of Indian Affairs on behalf of Quapaw people (who were then mostly excluded from mine work). They moved on short notice as the “diggin’s” expanded, evicted by progress. In 1948 Meridel Le Sueur (1900-1996) traveled to the Tri-State mining district at its productive end. Where useful ore made up only two percent of the dirt, they were pulling mountains of rock to the surface to parse out any profit. The extra stuff was called “chat.” The shack she stayed in during her visit, like most in Picher, had come to town in pieces on family migrations from area farms and older district camps.

Le Sueur is identified mostly with the Upper Midwest, but this landscape of the Lower Midwest epitomizes her life’s work: proletarian literature and reportage about industrial capitalism’s paired assaults on women and land. Her mother’s home on Minneapolis’s tony Lowry Hill, where Le Sueur taught writing after World War II, will not do as a landscape for Le Sueur. The “wasteland of ruined earth and human refuse” she encountered in extreme northeast Oklahoma will.

“It’s the chat, overn everything,” explained Le Sueur’s interview subject, the titular “Eroded Woman” of this trip’s product, an article for the left-wing Masses and Mainstream. The woman wiped a chair for the writer. “Her eyes seemed dusted” with chat, wrote Le Sueur, “their blueness dimmed and yet wide open and upon me.” The Eroded Woman was the wife and mother of mine workers, and she nursed her husband through the district’s environmental scourge, silicosis — “You drown in your own blood, you do,” lamented their son.

The Eroded Woman and her family were partisans of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, which was affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). That made them outcasts in a district of proud, American-born laborers who had violently excluded Black Americans, immigrants, and labor organizers from their camps, certain that they were future bosses themselves and didn’t need a radical union. Just Le Sueur’s kind of person, the Eroded Woman repaired the son’s wounds from “the Klan, the bosses, pickhandlers,” who beat every man with a union button during mid-1930s labor strife. “I’m mighty proud of him not to lick the boots of the company,” she declared. She and her men resisted their town’s xenophobia. They exemplified the ideal of what the historian Julia Mickenberg has called Le Sueur’s “alternative Americanism.”

The shack is most certainly gone. Nothing in Picher met a dignified end when the mines closed across the 1950s and ’60s, except proud citizens, who willed theirs, usually by moving away. Even the landmark Connell Hotel was razed, its rubble filling an abandoned mine shaft in 1972.

In the 1980s, a new generation of feminists rediscovered Le Sueur. More recently have come the regionalists. Late in life she said she was “a passionate, partisan Midwest lover,” but that didn’t tell it all. More accurately, she loved the Midwest at its margins, and no place was more marginal than the Tri-State mines in the late 1940s.

“Eroded Woman” and its landscape embodied what Le Sueur’s editor Elaine Hedges called her “central formulation of female experience.” It focused on one woman haunted by the deaths of children and “the plunge into the darkness of the underground, the woman (or the earth) as wounded, invaded, and raped.” “Eroded Woman” was suffused with agrarian longing for what was lost on the land when capitalists extracted progress from beneath it. Amid shifting political winds in the late 1940s, perhaps Le Sueur felt her McCarthy-era persecution coming. She closed:

All over mid-America now lamplight reveals the old earth, reveals the story of water, and the sound of water in the darkness repeats the myth and legends of old struggles. The fields lie there, the plow handles wet, standing useless in the mud, the countless seeds, the little houses, the big houses, the vast spider network of us all in the womb of history, looking fearful, not knowing at this moment the strength, doubting the strength, often fearful of giant menace, fearful of peculiar strains and wild boar power and small eyes of the fox.

The lower continent underlying all, speaks below us, the gulf, the black old land.

Meridel Le Sueur’s life and work remind us of the hopeful and radical potential of regionalism and place — that tradition and history, rather than being reactionary, can gird people for progressive struggle. Picher, down from 10,000 people to about 2,000, unincorporated in 2009 after a contentious buyout process and the coup de grâce of a tornado that killed seven people and destroyed more than 100 homes. The Quapaws remain, remediating mine waste with the Environmental Protection Agency.

The chat piles, once the symbol of a proud community’s work, stand now like monuments to folly, leaching their payload of heavy metals into Tar Creek and rendering a large area uninhabitable. Without the shacks and the people who built them, the piles memorialize only the bankruptcy of past racial and ethnic exclusion. The “white man’s camp” of the early twentieth century proved to be no bulwark against economic and environmental collapse. As Meridel Le Sueur could surely have told us, it’s a good lesson for our time of climate crisis, economic precarity, hardening borders, and rising xenophobia.

Joe Schiller is an acquisitions editor at the University of Oklahoma Press. He is also a PhD candidate in history at the University of Oklahoma, writing an environmental history of deindustrialization in the rural Tri-State mining district. He lives in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, and tweets @Joe_Schiller.

Photo courtesy Library of Congress: “Zinc miner’s home. Picher, Oklahoma,” by Arthur Rothstein, May 1936. LC-DIG-fsa-8b38342.

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Crutchfield
Tulsa, Oklahoma

By Caleb Freeman

One day in the winter of 1981, when the film adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s 1967 novel The Outsiders was still in pre-production, Hinton and Francis Ford Coppola, the film’s director, rode double on a bicycle down North Tulsa’s side streets. More than 60 pounds of film equipment sat in their handlebar basket, so they had to stop periodically to keep from falling onto the pavement. Their route took them into one of the city’s oldest mixed-use neighborhoods. They rode past houses in various states of disrepair, many of them built shortly after the city was incorporated in 1898, as well as industrial sites and manufacturing plants, some empty and derelict, abandoned in the years of suburban sprawl.

Their destination was a house that Coppola had stumbled upon, a dilapidated Craftsman bungalow located at 731 North St. Louis Ave. in the Crutchfield neighborhood. With its rusted chain-link fence and overgrown lawn, it was a promising candidate for the Curtis house, where Darry, Sodapop, and Ponyboy, the orphaned protagonists of The Outsiders, would live. Hinton agreed, and when production began the next year, that house was at the heart of it.

Hinton’s novel of warring teenage gangs, written fifteen years earlier when she was a student at Will Rogers High School, has a complicated relationship with Tulsa. Hinton is from Tulsa, and by all accounts set the story here too, but chose not to include any real names or landmarks in order to, as she told the local newspaper, “protect the guilty.” When she wrote The Outsiders, Hinton was bearing witness to teenage alienation and violent socioeconomic segregation, and these weren’t Tulsa problems; they were everywhere.

The film took a different approach, fully embedding itself in Tulsa. In March 1982, Zoetrope Studios moved into Crutchfield, setting up their production team in the former Lowell Elementary School building, which had been closed four years prior. In a type of method acting, the young cast members haunted the city as greasers, stealing from local drug stores, staying out all night, and sometimes sleeping in the Curtis house, which didn’t have any heat. Local markers — the Oklahoma Steel Castings Company, the Admiral Twin Drive-In, the Art Deco architecture of Will Rogers High School and Boston Avenue Methodist Church — appear in the film. Hinton and Coppola even revised the story so that the Greasers would live on the north side instead of the east, a more accurate geographic representation of Tulsa’s class and racial divide. When the filming was done, Coppola threw a party in Crutchfield Park, complete with carnival rides, an abundance of food and beer, and an ice sculpture. He received a key to the city from the mayor and an appreciation plaque from the Crutchfield Neighborhood Association.

Then he left. The film came out in 1983, and members of the Oklahoma Film Industry Task Force, which had lobbied hard for Coppola to film in Tulsa, relished their success. Much of the young cast went on to become celebrities. Crutchfield, on the other hand, faded into memory.

The neighborhood is still here, though, just north of the historic “Frisco” Railway, which once brought hopeful settlers and cutthroat opportunists to Tulsa back when the area was still known as Indian Territory. Now you drive through Crutchfield and see the husks of uninhabited buildings. The neighborhood kindergarten was shut down in 1986. The Oklahoma Steel Castings Company closed a year later, leaving behind a polluted 10-acre lot. The oil bust of the 1980s drove out many of the neighborhood’s remaining manufacturers, and many residents who could afford to leave did. By 2007, approximately one-third of the houses in the neighborhood were abandoned. Rates of violent crime rose to become the highest in Tulsa.

The neighborhood association, led by longtime residents — truck drivers, store owners, church leaders — advocated tirelessly for Crutchfield. They organized neighborhood cleanups, met with city officials, and developed a revitalization plan which called in part for better infrastructure and more public facilities, including a new school. Although the City of Tulsa approved the plan in 2004, little has changed. In 2006, Tulsa Public Schools spent $3.3 million converting the old Lowell Elementary building, the former production site for The Outsiders, into a four-and-a-half acre “state-of-the-art” ropes course. Although it was touted as a boon to the community, the course was fenced off and inaccessible to the neighborhood’s residents. The course was later closed in 2017 due to budget cuts, and the site once again sits abandoned.

Today, Crutchfield is still without a school or a grocery store. Its predominately Hispanic population experiences some of the worst health outcomes and rates of poverty in the city. Although the neighborhood is one of Tulsa’s oldest, the City has never treated it with the same significance as its other historic neighborhoods.

As my girlfriend and I drive through Crutchfield in the winter of 2021, I wonder about the decision to bring The Outsiders film to Tulsa. When the novel was released, local media was quick to absolve the city. The Tulsa World suggested that, although the setting was Tulsa, “it could be any city.” After watching the film, though, I wonder if Hinton might say otherwise.

The Outsiders is a story about boundary lines, divisions that we create and perpetuate. It’s a fitting story for Tulsa, a city whose inclination towards boosterism — as the self-proclaimed “Magic City” and “Oil Capital of the World” — frequently has sanitized and distorted its history, almost always at the expense of its marginalized communities.

Crutchfield sits just north of the line that divided Cherokee Nation and Muscogee (Creek) Nation land, one of the lines established by the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The neighborhood was named after Vinita Crutchfield, who was allotted the land after the General Allotment Act. She appears on the Dawes Roll as a nine-year-old Cherokee girl living with her mother. Growing up, Crutchfield would have lived on the dividing line much like the characters in Hinton’s novel.

One mile to the east of Crutchfield is Tulsa’s Greenwood district, which was once 40 square blocks of Black-owned land known as “Black Wall Street.” Born of entrepreneurship, Greenwood was a precarious haven for Black Oklahomans during a time when the state adopted strict Jim Crow laws. Local newspapermen disparaged Greenwood as “Little Africa,” and the growth of the KKK in Tulsa posed an increasing threat. In May 1921, a white mob invaded, razed, and, in the end, partially annexed Greenwood, killing its residents in a state-sanctioned slaughter. For decades, the Tulsa Race Massacre, as it would come to be known, remained a secret, a part of Tulsa’s history hidden from people like me who never learned about it in school. From Crutchfield, just beyond the borderlines of Lansing Ave. and the Midland Valley railway tracks, you would have been able to see the smoke of Greenwood’s burning buildings.

When we arrive at the Curtis home, which was purchased in 2016 and converted into a small museum dedicated to The Outsiders, I think about the people of Crutchfield. Surrounding the home are boarded-up houses flying tattered American flags. Stray dogs roam the area. Less than a block away from the house is an auto shop, the same type of place where Ponyboy might have worked. We stay for a little while, driving around the neighborhood. When we leave, I think about the tyranny of boundaries and the exorbitant privilege of being able to cross them.

Caleb Freeman was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he is a freelance writer, an adjunct English instructor, and a part-time librarian. When he is not working with words, he is more than likely annoying his cats. Follow him on Twitter @calebdfreeman. 

 

Photograph by Megan Hosmer, an artist, teacher, and Tulsa transplant. Her work primarily centers around feminist questions of identity and community through photographic portraiture. Check out her artwork at https://www.meganhosmer.com/.

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Tallgrass Prairie Preserve
Osage County, Oklahoma 

By Mason Whitehorn Powell

“Three ridges roughly boat-shaped push their prows south into the sea of prairie.” The opening lines of Talking to the Moon by Osage author John Joseph Mathews describe the land where he would build a sandstone cabin in 1932 to live out the remainder of his life. Published in 1945, Talking to the Moon is an intimate reflection on the landscape, wildlife, occasional tribal affairs, and seasonal changes that he experienced across this decade.

Mathews named his one-room cabin The Blackjacks, moored by those eponymous native oak trees and harbored by a sea of prairie. The cabin was abandoned after his death in 1979, and his grave remains on the property, which is now surrounded by a fence to keep roaming buffalo off the grounds. The Blackjacks and the land surrounding it were purchased from Mathews’ descendants by The Nature Conservancy in 2014 and, during summer 2020, I toured the cabin digitally, in a virtual event hosted by TNC and the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve.

I may have never seen the Blackjacks with my own eyes, but I know the world he describes because I was cut from the same cloth. After serving as a pilot during in World War I, studying at the University of Oklahoma, obtaining a degree in Natural Sciences from Oxford, and roaming around Europe, Mathews grew travel weary and was drawn back to the lands he knew intimately and loved. He returned home to allotted land on the Tallgrass prairie north of Pawhuska, Oklahoma, his birth town.

His words are familiar to me, as an Osage having the same blood quantum as Mathews, raised in Osage County, pulled between tribal traditions and the white influence upon my own life. I also studied in Europe; I met my wife there and lived in Italy for a time before returning to reside in an even older native sandstone building in Hominy, Oklahoma with family allotments not too far from Mathews’ cabin. 

Mathews writes, “My coming back was dramatic in a way; a weight on the sensitive scales of nature, which I knew would eventually be adjusted if I live as I had planned to live; to become a part of the balance.” Structured by and depicting the four seasons, Talking to the Moon is subdivided according to the traditional Osage calendar: moon phases. Everything is structured as so — one only has to look. I write this as the Yellow-Flower Moon fades into Deer-Hiding Moon. Heat enters through my window and I notice that the yellow flowers growing in my yard have closed up. Behind my grandfather’s house, a doe and fawn are beginning to stir on cooler evenings, but the bucks have already vanished as hunters ready themselves.

Under this same moon, Mathews writes of driving to Hominy to meet with the old Osage men, Claremore, Abbot, and Pitts, to have their portraits painted by an artist with the Public Works of Art Project. These portraits are still on display in the Osage Tribal Museum in Pawhuska, which Mathews established in 1938. From 1934 to 1942, he sat on the Tribal Council on that same hill rising above downtown Pawhuska, where my mother also served for two terms as an Osage Congresswoman.

My grandfather never met Mathews but tells me about my family’s encounter with him:

“About half those books were given to him by your [great-great-] aunt Magella. When he’d run out of things that weren’t in a book somewhere he could study, or come out of the Catholic Diocese or wherever, then he’d have Magella tell him what had really happened. Where they came from. What families you were talking about.”

He summed up the conversation: “My dad told my aunt, ‘Don’t you be giving him any more information.’”

Mathews and my blind aunt Magella Whitehorn were speaking after the “old ways” were laid to rest during her father’s generation. Mathews and Magella were both born in 1894 in Osage Indian Territory, twenty-two years after our final relocation. She was a full-blood and among the last of those born onto the ground and raised with a bundle, observing the ancient Osage religion.

In the posthumously published autobiography Twenty Thousand Mornings, Mathews writes of his childhood bedroom, from which he “could look down into the valley.” From this vantage point, he could hear Magella’s father and other elders rise before dawn to greet the sun with prayers, which sounds he recounts as “the scar” of “a precocious memory.” Mathews writes, “The prayer-chant that disturbed my little boy’s soul to the depths was Neolithic man talking to god.”

In her youth, Magella was sent to boarding school and pressured to relinquish her traditional Osage identity and status grounded in our ceremonial rites. She did so because her elders said to, and it must have felt like entering an oblivion. Even though Mathews spent a career wrestling with his precocious memory of Osage mysteries — a lifelong attempt to capture and confront the past with words — there remained a painful tension between those who had to leave the old ways behind and those raised to inherit the new world. For Magella, this was a tragic episode. And her brother Sam Whitehorn, my great-grandfather, told her not to speak with Mathews because he viewed her knowledge of the past as family business.

The land speaks in indescribable ways, and our history is mysterious in its abandonment as we are adopted into a new world. It is evident in his writings that Mathews experienced a different Osage County than I know, but my generation still faces many of the same concerns, will pass down similar traditions, and can still fully experience that immutable landscape. A cabin is just a building. That was never the point—rather that it is centered, grounded, embraced by land that knows and accepts us, that is our inheritance despite ongoing changes. Lost traditions survive in both Mathews’ books and family stories such as my own. Mathews knew that Osage history must be preserved, just as land must be conserved, because the two are inseparable.

The more I learn from the rolling hills around me, the more I know about myself. Any time I drive north from Hominy towards Pawhuska, crossing a sea of prairie and islands of blackjacks, I feel at home and overwhelmed by acceptance. I haven’t needed to visit his cabin to know these things, only to truly see nature here, and to listen. When the world allows and in-person tours resume, I hope to step inside Mathews’ cabin. Until then, I have the Osage landscape and my connection to Mathews in our shared culture and his books: “with word symbols as my poor tools, to sweat at the feet of a beauty, an order, a perfection, a mystery far above my comprehension.”

Mason Whitehorn Powell is a freelance journalist based in Oklahoma and Rome, Italy. An enrolled member of the Osage Nation, his work often explores Indigenous arts and representation. 

Photo courtesy of Tallgrass Nature Conservancy.

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