Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie - Softcover

Ortiz, Roxanne Dunbar

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0806137754 ISBN 13: 9780806137759

Verlag: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006

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A classic in contemporary Oklahoma literature, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Red Dirt unearths the joys and ordeals of growing up poor during the 1940s and 1950s. In this exquisite rendering of her childhood in rural Oklahoma, from the Dust Bowl days to the end of the Eisenhower era, the author bears witness to a family and community that still cling to the dream of America as a republic of landowners.

 

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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a writer, teacher, historian, and social activist, is Professor Emerita of Ethnic Studies and Women's Studies at California State University, East Bay, and author or editor of numerous scholarly articles and books, including the award-winning An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, as well as two other memoirs.

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In this exquisite rendering of her childhood in rural Oklahoma, from the Dust Bowl days to the end of the Eisenhower era, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz bears witness to a family and community which still clings to the dream of America as a republic of landowners.

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Red Dirt

Growing Up OkieBy Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

University of Oklahoma Press

Copyright © 2006 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780806137759

CHAPTER ONE

Red Diaper Baby?

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few who make up the employing class have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on, until all the toilers come together on the political as well as on the industrial field, and take and hold that which they produce by their labor.

From the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World, 1905

I was born Roxie Amanda Dunbar. `Dust Bowl baby' they called me and my nickname was `Baby.' I was a surely unwanted last child with two brothers -- Laurence, eleven, and Hank, two -- and a sister, Vera, nine. I would ask Daddy if they had wanted me when he told me about those hard times, and he would say, `Sure, else I wouldn't have paid a doctor ten dollars to come and birth you.' Once I understood how really destitute they had been I realized he meant what he said. Yet on my birth certificate Daddy listed his occupation as `proprietor of feed store' and Mama's as `housewife,' sounding so secure.

My life began on a hot late summer Saturday, September 10, 1938, in San Antonio, Texas. I was born in the one-room shack where the five of them lived behind my uncle's house. For the first three days my name was Marvel, named after Mama's best friend, a failed opera singer who sang in honky-tonks. But Mama had a fight with Marvel and decided not to name me after her. Daddy came up with the name Roxie. He always told me he saw that name on a marquee in New Orleans' French Quarter when he went there with some other cowboys as a teenager. He said that the Roxie club was named after abeautiful stripper. Mama always said he was making all that up.

My mother never talked about that time in San Antonio when she was pregnant with me. But I can imagine how she suffered. I know the facts because Vera has told me many times. She was nine and remembers it well. In June of that year my grandmother sold the feed store Daddy was running and they were evicted from the house they rented. During those last three months before I was born they were homeless, and it was a scorcher of a summer as always in south Texas -- humid, unbearable. They took refuge with Daddy's oldest brother, a veterinarian in San Antonio. My uncle was bankrupt himself but let my family live in a one-room storage space behind his house, windowless, an oven. All that summer Mama and Daddy and the three children were stuffed in that hot, windowless room.

Some ailment struck my mother with a vengeance. They said it was poison ivy, but who knows? It was chronic, afflicting her for years before and after I was born. On every inch of Mama's body, Vera says, even inside her nose, ears, mouth, vagina, anus, were swollen welts bloody from scratching. How relieved she must have been when her body was freed at least of me. Mama couldn't nurse me because of the sores. So it was Vera who wound up caring for me, holding me and feeding me from a bottle. I long blamed my mother for my debilitating, disabling bronchial asthma that began soon after I was born, and I'm certain she blamed herself.

My father's name is Moyer Haywood Pettibone Scarberry Dunbar. When I was growing up he would read to me from the framed 1905 IWW Constitution, and tell me: `I was born two years after the IWW, and Papa named me after the founders: William Moyer, Big Bill Haywood, and George Pettibone. They were on trial, framed up for murder in Boise, Idaho, during that summer of 1907 when I was born, same year Oklahoma got statehood. Clarence Darrow got them off. One Big Union, that's what your grandfather fought for.' Then Daddy would rail against the current trade unions.

Hanging on the bedroom wall beside the IWW Constitution was a framed photograph from 1912 of my father's entire family, my grandfather and grandmother sitting on the wide front porch of their spacious two-story house. All ten children were dressed in their Sunday best. Daddy was five years old in that picture. My grandfather, EmmettVictor Dunbar, was nearly forty, but youthful with thick dark hair, muscular, handsome. I would stand on the bed and trace my grandfather's features with my finger, and stare into his eyes. I talked to him. He began to look like Jesus to me; my mother's framed picture of Jesus in the front room never brought out a sense of devotion compared to that of my grandfather's picture.

Next to the photograph was Grandpa Dunbar's diploma in veterinarian medicine from St. Joseph, Missouri, dated 1910. He had moved his family from Missouri to Piedmont, Oklahoma in 1907,just after Daddy was born, and returned alone to Kansas and then Missouri for three years to study medicine. During those years, Grandma was practically a single mother caring for five little children in Piedmont, where her entire extended family had settled. Grandpa had joined the Socialist Party when it was founded in1901 -- eastern Kansas and western Missouri formed the southwest center of the Socialist Party -- but was attracted to the more radical IWW once it was founded. Already a committed Wobbly when Daddy was born, Grandpa continued his involvement while in medical school and returned to Piedmont an organizer as well as a highly respected professional. Daddy said Grandpa rotated three teams of horses to make his doctoring calls around a fifty-milearea -- cattle and horses were his specialty.

Beside the veterinarian diploma and the picture, a worn, thin red book -- my grandfather's IWW union book -- hung from a string, `Emmett Victor Dunbar' scrawled inside.

`Why did Grandpa take you all to Texas?' I'd ask.

`Danged Klan ran us off, some of them same folks you see in church on Sunday. They're pretty brave when they got sheets over their heads. Nothing but cowards. Papa had to sell out lock, stock and barrel.'

Daddy was fourteen when the family moved to the border town of McAllen in the Texas Rio Grande Valley. Grandfather Emmett died in 1934, kicked by a horse he was doctoring. But my father held the KKK responsible because a dozen years before they had beat my grandfather half to death and left him with brain damage.

Daddy told me over and over about those years before the First World War when the Wobblies controlled the town and county where I grew up, and practically all of the mines and fields and woods of western North America: the glory days. My father liked to tell stories about them while he cleaned his hunting rifle; the smell of gun oil and flint went with the story.

`Your Grandpa organized all the sharecroppers and tenants and cotton pickers and wheat thrashers, all them migrants from here to yon. Papa got himself elected to the school board, that same school you go to. One time a bunch of landlords tried to take the school with guns, waving their red white and blue flags. Papa and all us brothers held up there five days shooting it out with them, and we whupped them good.'

`How old were you then, Daddy?'

`About your age, ten, eleven, but I was a good shot. Papa always chose me to ride shotgun on his wagon when he made his rounds doctoring.'

`What did the Wobblies want?' I asked. No matter how many times he told me, I loved to hear his agenda of Wobbly dreams: abolition of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Oklahoma Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0806137754
• ISBN 13: 9780806137759
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 238
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar