Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie. - book reviews

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie (New York: Verso, 1997) $25.00. 224pp.

As a couple of New Yorkers once wrote: "The wavin' wheat / Can sure smell sweet / When the wind comes right behind the rain," but the Oklahoma wind can dry up your crop or bring flash floods, not to mention hailstones the size of baseballs or tornados that rip the hides right off the cattle. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz describes this world--her world---in her moving memoir Red Dirt: Growing Up Oki:

In Oklahoma we though we knew everything. In that tiny total universe we divided the world into opposites: male and female; animal and human; sky and earth; night and day; winter and summer; good and bad; country and city; poor and rich; patriot and traitor; devil and God.... Winter was neither preceded by autumn colors nor followed by spring flowers and gentle rain; winter simply turned into chaos along about April ... hot, howling wind that carried clouds of red dirt and spread raging prairie fires.... Our world was Manichaean not Buddhist; no yin and yang. There was not balance, just absolutes.

Dunbar-Ortiz was female, country, poor, often regarded as a traitor, and inclined to side with rebels from the devil on down to Little Richard and Jack Kerouac. She saw the beauty of the land, but could never stomach the mindless boosterism and fear of criticism that small American communities impose upon their members. She was acutely aware of the shaky social standing of her own family, especially of her part-Indian mother who had had a rough bringing up and went from teetotaler to drunkard with frightening rapidity during Dunbar-Ortiz's adolescence.

She was also aware that as an American of mostly Scots-Irish ancestry, she was part of a group which for centuries had been privileged to kill or exploit races and cultures regarded as inferior. It was more complex than that: African American cavalrymen had not only been used against natives but also against white "boomers" and "sooners" who occupied land before the government gave them permission. Later African Americans were used to break strikes. Indian tribes were used against each other. Native Americans had sufficient political savvy to get themselves declared white by the segregationist 1907 state constitution.

Like many of us who chose to question and sometimes fight, she had to struggle against the willed cultural amnesia that was especially virulent in Oklahoma during the 1940s and 1950s. She knew that she had had an IWW grandfather and was aware that the Socialist and labor movements had been violently repressed during and after The First World War by police terrorism aided by organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. The memory of the great camp meeting addressed by Eugene V. Debs, Kate Richards O'Hare, and the radical humorist Oscar Ameringer (whom many considered the peer of Will Rogers) had long since faded. Dunbar-Ortiz was never told that Oklahoma had once had dozens of Socialist newspapers, that the Socialist were once the ranking minority in the Oklahoma legislature, and the United States entry into the First World War had been greeted with an armed uprising of tenant farmers. She saw the Weavers at the Oklahoma State Fair in 1949, but they were soon blacklisted and their songs suppressed, and she knew little else of songwriters like Oklahoma's Woody Guthrie until after she had left the state. There were witnesses to Oklahoma's radical past, but the vast majority of them were afraid to talk.

The land in Canadian County is level, but the metaphorical playing field for its inhabitants was not. Schools in the towns did not equal schools in the country; schools for the children of the poor were always and markedly inferior. Baptists were not equal to Episcopalians. Members of the Church of Christ were not equal to Baptists. No Roman Catholic was equal to any variety of Protestant. The unchurched were even more despised pariahs than the Catholics. Young women who made dresses from feed sacks printed with attractive patterns were not equal to young women who bought dresses in stores. Publicly noticing any of these inequalities could get you blacklisted or run out of the state, as Dunbar-Ortiz and I can bear witness. Yet people did not always show their unpleasant side, and it is possible to retain pleasant memories of Oklahoma's land and people, as both of us do.

Dunbar-Ortiz faced many obstacles, both blatant and subtle, but she acquired an education that was fundamentally sound if a little patchy, and she learned to master her own demons and to cope with those that troubled her loved ones. She has been frustrated and trapped many times, but she has refused to stay trapped. Along the way she has learned to write some really remarkable prose, as true to her Oklahoma roots as that of Ralph Ellison to his. This memoir should be read by everyone who wants a true understanding of an important part of the American experience.

J. Quinn Brisben, a retired Chicago high school teacher Who has been an activist in many social causes since the 1950s, was born and raised in Garfield Country, Oklahoma, two counties north of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's Canadian County.

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