The Wind Came Sweepin' Down the Plain

No waving wheat, this week in Oklahoma. Devastation, instead.

What about this small, mostly rural state, one of the reddest among the red?

As it happens, I grew up there, in Tulsa, where we considered ourselves the civilized part of what even we (or maybe especially we) regarded as a hick place. Tulsa was hilly, and reasonably green, being on the edge of the Ozarks in the relatively settled eastern part of the state, the former Indian Territory where the "five civilized tribes ended up after being driven from their towns in the Southeast US by the racist policies of the likes of Andrew Jackson. Tulsa sophisticated home of actual tall buildings (a few, anyway), wasn't like the dusty, flat prairies to the west. It was the "Oil Capital of the World." It was also, though no one spoke of this all the years of my childhood, the site of one of the worst massacres of black people in US history, 25 years before I was born.

It was a nice place to grow up, and, of course, for us it was the center of the universe.

Time sorta slipped from the grasp of the Okies, it has seemed to me. Houston, where you could buy a drink, usurped the "Oil Capital" honors as the big oil companies moved away or were bought by bigger oil companies. The population, which had pretty much stagnated after 1930 (actually declining between 1930 and 1960), began to grow again after the Sixties, in fits and starts; but still. It now has about as many people as Puerto Rico, a bit over 1% of the US population. My brother calls it "flyover country," in that sort of stubborn-pride way some people, feeling themselves marginalized in the opinion of others, wear that sense as a badge of honor.

We don't hear much about Oklahoma except for the disasters: the bombing by Timothy McVeigh that ushered in the era of modern domestic terrorism, the tornadoes, like the one yesterday. But the people are nice, welcoming, for the most part at least in the cities, and unpretentious. It was a fine place to be a kid in the 1950s (if you weren't a black or Indian kid, anyway, and your folks weren't poor).

More on Oklahoma in a future post.