Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 12, 1993 TAG: 9304120261
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: C3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GEOFF SEAMANS ASSOCIATE EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
RED & WHITE IN OKLAHOMA BOOK KINDLES MEMORIES OF BOYHOOD IN CHEROKEE CAPITAL
YOU WANT weird, I'll give you weird.The other day, my wife brought home a couple of mysteries from the public library.
"There's one you might be interested in," she said. "It's set in Tahlequah."
Tahlequah? As in Oklahoma?
It's a small town, on the fringe of the Ozarks, about 75 miles east of Tulsa and 30 or so west of the Arkansas line. It's the home of a state college, the county seat of Cherokee County, the capital of the Cherokee Nation - and the place where I spent half my growing-up years, a white kid in a red-and-white community.
My family moved away the summer after I finished 10th grade; I've been back since, but it's been a long while.
Tahlequah? Sure I was interested.
In my time there, in the last half of the '50s and very early '60s, Tahlequah had only about 5,000 souls, though the population is now up to 10,000 according to the World Almanac. We lived close to the middle of town.
It shouldn't have been surprising, then, that the simplified map of Tahlequah at the beginning of the book should have hit so close to home.
But it was and it did. When I opened the book that evening and turned to the map, memories came flooding back.
Holy tamole, there's Choctaw Street, the state highway heading west to Wagoner that I had to cross when I rode my bike or walked to Sequoyah Elementary School. And Goingsnake Street, where a friend lived who had in his back yard a regulation-height basketball goal with a store-bought backboard. And Muskogee Avenue, the main drag so named because it was also the highway to Muskogee, 29 miles to the southwest.
To us, Okies from Muskogee were not the country boys of song. To us, they were city slickers. Why, Muskogee (1950 population: 37,000) had medical specialists, a daily newspaper, and even a hobby shop that sold model-train accoutrements!
Holy tamole, there on the map was Town Branch (a branch of what, I never thought to ask), which arose somewhere north of Tahlequah. After running across the Northeastern State campus, it flowed through a small valley and city park that split Tahlequah's east and west sides. To the east stood a bluff (along whose top ran, appropriately, Bluff Avenue); on the west, a gentler hill sloped up to Muskogee Avenue and then another half-dozen blocks or so to a ridge that marked the edge of town.
What made Town Branch distinctive, or at least of considerable spectating interest to 12-year-old boys, was what happened in hard rains. The small creek became a raging torrent into which flowed raw sewage from the municipal system. Presumably, in the intervening 35 years, environmental regulations have forced authorities to deal with the problem.
Holy tamole, the map even has West Downing Street on it. And it shows the corner, three blocks west of Town Branch (but - mercifully for when it rained hard - at an appreciably higher elevation), where I lived for eight years. The map even got right a small irregularity in the street configuration, at the bottom of a lawn climbing up to what 35 years ago was Tahlequah High School.
At the bottom of the hill, a half-block from our house, was the high-school gym. There, before throngs of dozens, the Tahlequah Tigers consistently lost more games than they won, sometimes a lot more.
But for a while, Tahlequah did have the best archer in the world, an Indian by the name of Thornton. I remember honking on my cornet as the high-school band marched down Muskogee Avenue in a parade welcoming home the new champion.
That parade, and the high-school homecoming and rodeo parades the band also marched in, invariably started at the north end of Muskogee Avenue and marched southward. It was never south to north. Tradition, I guess. Or maybe the north-to-south direction made it slightly downhill the whole way, thus transforming mere parades into a metaphor for life.
The book that kindled the reminiscing is "Ravenmocker" by Jean Hager, published last year by Mysterious Press of New York. Turns out, it's the fourth in her "Cherokee Nation Mystery" series.
The obvious comparison is to Tony Hillerman, whose popular mysteries featuring Navajos in the Four Corners area of Arizona and New Mexico, have won raves from non-Indians and Navajos alike. Clearly, the publishers are trying to trade on the comparison: The notes on the inside front flap of the "Ravenmocker" dust cover begin, "Much as Tony Hillerman combines Navajo culture with contemporary mystery, Jean Hager's novels . . . ."
Hager isn't Hillerman, but she pays admirably Hillerman-like attention to cultural and geographic detail. (Also like Hillerman, she lives not in the place she writes about, but in the nearest sizable city: Tulsa for Hager, Albuquerque for Hillerman.)
Which doesn't mean the details of Cherokee culture parallel those of Navajo culture, any more than the wooded hills of northeastern Oklahoma resemble the desertscapes of northern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico.
To a non-expert outside observer like myself, the biggest difference is Cherokee assimilationism. A frequent Hillerman theme is the internal struggle within individual Navajos, on their vast and thinly populated reservation, between respect for the old ways on the one hand and the lure of majority American culture on the other. It's not a theme in "Ravenmocker," and it's hard for me to imagine how it could be.
There's no Cherokee reservation in Oklahoma: The Cherokee Nation is a corporation, not a geographic entity. Intermarriage with whites has been commonplace for 150 years: I knew a lot of kids who were part Indian, few who were wholly so.
My observations, though, are colored by the spirit of the times in which I lived in Tahlequah.
Thirty-five years ago, the liberal version of political correctness was that America's melting-pot destiny was to be a close-knit Ozzie-and-Harriet family. The conservative version saw a similar destiny, but for whites only. Neither version celebrated minority cultures or assigned much value to diversity.
But that has changed. I wonder today whether I and some of my childhood friends were more different from each other than either of us knew.