Virtual Book Tour -- Stop 3

Septima Clark

I am so happy to visit your classroom this morning. I am so happy to see the work you have been doing. I suppose you already know that before your teacher returned to Delaware she taught in the Bronx, which is how we got to know one another. Yes, the kids in the Bronx absolutely loved her. They were really sorry when she left.

Here's how I want to do this. I'm going to read a passage from my novel Though An Army Come Against Us and then I will answer all your questions. At least I'll answer all the questions I can until the bell rings at the end of the class period. So settle in and here goes.

Johns Island South Carolina1916

November 27 

So much of note has happened since yesterday that I must confide it all to the pages of this teaching journal before the intensity of the memories fades! I want to be able to refer later to these notes. I also hope that by putting them in writing I can clarify my thinking on these events. 

For the last two months (has it really been such a short time?) I have been busy taking in new sights and sounds; I have done precious little reflection. When I re-read my first impressions now they seem all wrong: it is as if I was seeing everything through the lens of Mother’s prejudices about two-for-five folk instead of looking at the living people who were in front of my eyes.

I have been utterly preoccupied with what Promise Land School does not have! We do not have a chalkboard or chalk. We have no books of any kind. The school lacks even stout walls to keep out the cold winds of autumn! The privy smells. The well is suspect. Miss Ivy and I must chop wood for the stove every morning. We are cast out on this island and – in my worst moments – I despair that nobody remembers our presence here.

But yesterday I remembered our blessings. In the morning, before worship, Mr. Flood Wilson came up to me and asked, “Miss Seppy, would you be willing to teach reading to some of the men after their working hours?” How quick I had been to dismiss them all as without ambition! They work so hard in all weathers and yet they are prepared to make time for elementary education! I am ashamed of myself for seeing them in such a bad light. 

During worship I prayed that Jesus would help me to discern the blessings in our challenges here. It came to me as a revelation: if the school board never visits, then we are free to teach the children what we want. If they do not provide us with books, then we are free to use whatever we can. And if they value the children so little as not to know even how many they are, then we are free to value each one as if he or she were our own. I felt unchained by these epiphanies, as if a great weight has been lifted from me. 

This morning even splitting and stacking fuel for the school stove felt like light work. I nailed a large paper bag to the front wall of my classroom, and once the children were seated and I had called the roll I asked, “Who will tell me a story?” 

My request met with silence. This was not what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to say things to them and then make them parrot my words. I was supposed to write things down and make them read those things back. I was not supposed to ask them to say anything to me other than what I had already said to them. And so they sat mute. I was quite certain they had heard me, so, instead of repeating my request I waited in silence. 

After an uncomfortably long time, perhaps a full minute, Junie Harris asked, with a laugh, “You want to hear a story, Miss Seppy?” 

My heart sank. I dreaded what I would hear now. He is the rudest and crudest of boys. But I had opened this door so now I had to give him a chance. “Yes, Junie. Please tell us your story.” 

With a smirk, Junie began. I copy this now directly from the paper bag, where I wrote as he spoke: in his words, as he told it. “Once there been a Ibo man what been a great fiddler. He know better than all them people what for do with a fiddle. When he lean back and draw he bow, nobody can keep from shuffle he foot. One day he going for play at a party. He have he fiddle in a bag. Bruh Bear and Bruh Tiger take he track and run him through a swamp. The man was scared, but he wouldn’t drop he fiddle. He climb a tree and fix himself in a branch. Bruh Tiger begin for crawl up the tree for catch him. The man holler and try for scare the beast, but he wasn’t scared. He keep on the climb up.  

“Then the man draw he fiddle and he bow and begin for play with all he strength. Bruh Tiger obliged for stop for listen to him and the tune sweeten Bruh Tiger. He turn around and come down the tree. Him and Bruh Bear grab hands and set in for dance. The faster the fiddler play, the faster them dance. Them gone round and round till them dead tired. At length them drop for ground for catch them wind. The fiddler slip down the tree and leave. Bruh Tiger and Bruh Bear ain’t have strength for follow him and so he music save him.” 

I wrote this on the paper bag as he spoke. I wrote it just as he spoke it. I wrote “he” for “his,” “ain’t” for “didn’t,” and “Bruh” for “Brother.” Several times I asked him to wait to let me catch up. He looked suspicious… or maybe just puzzled. The other children laughed again and again. They laughed at Junie’s story and – I think – at the fact that I allowed him to tell it without interruption or reprimand. 

When he was done the class was silent again. I called on Mazalea Gaddis, my best reader: “Mazalea, will you come forward and read Junie’s story?” And, to the awed wonderment of the class, she did just that, from my penciled notes on the paper bag, exactly as he had told it! 

I asked, “Who else will come forward and read Junie’s story?” This time it was me who was dumb with awestruck wonder, because who should raise his hand but Hamilton Brown, who the boys call Bubba! I had seen no indication before today that Hamilton knew so much as his alphabet. Each time I called on him he silently shook his head no. But here he was, confidently walking forward. 

I was right. He could not read the words written on the paper bag. But he stood facing his classmates and repeated what Junie said (and what Mazalea read) almost word for word! Bubba was a prodigy. His memory was astounding. 

Two more children read Junie’s story aloud to the class, haltingly and with a few errors. Throughout, Junie sat with a smile of great satisfaction and pride. As I write these words I remember our readings in Pestalozzi back at Avery Institute. He said it may be smart to pay attention to some children more than others, but it’s not right. Pestalozzi said I owe it to the child to give him more than what is necessary for what I imagine will be his station in life. But this goes way beyond recognizing Junie and his gifts. Because giving the children what is necessary (or more) implies that I am the one who holds everything of value. Have I truly been seeing any of the children of Promise Land School? Or have I only seen what I think they lack? Have I seen any of the adults of Johns Island? Or have I only seen the turnips they plant in their yards where I would put roses? 

There was one more revelation, too. After school I planned a home visit to Sibbie Rivers to discuss her academic progress with her mother. This time I checked with the Allens before embarrassing myself calling the mother by the child’s surname. Sibbie’s mother is Mrs. Eva Singleton. I ate dinner at the Allens before going. I do not like to impose on people for food when they seem to have so little themselves. 

Mrs. Singleton was just serving a crab stew to her four daughters when I arrived. And who should be sitting at the table with them? Sibbie’s classmate, Blue Gamble! I have not written much in these pages about Blue. He is mostly silent in class and likes to sit hunched down on his bench as if to reduce his chances of being seen by me. Seeing him at Sibbie’s house made me wonder why he wasn’t eating in his own home. 

And then I remembered: Blue may speak infrequently, but every time he does, it is about food. In early September I gave the children a spelling test. I called out the word “fish.” Blue immediately yelled, “Porgies be def!” Once during recess Exodus Jefferson told the boys about tripping on a tree root on his way to school. Blue asked, “Did you drop your lunch?” I wondered, have I ever seen Blue carrying or eating lunch? 

Mrs. Singleton generously ladled out a second helping of stew. Boys and their appetites! How many other mothers are feeding Blue Gamble? 

I am ashamed of the judgments I was so quick to make on my first days on this island. The people along Bohicket Creek make so much of so little. They are generous with me and I have responded to their open hands with mean-spirited condescension. I pledge myself to do better.

And that's what I want to share with you today. Does anybody have any questions?

Are you a teacher?

It comes across in the writing, I guess. Yes, I am. I taught for twenty-five years before I ever considered becoming a principal. Then I was a principal for ten years after that.

So these are your experiences?

Well, I would have to say both yes and no. I taught in the Bronx, not South Carolina. And I started teaching in 1974, not 1916. I had students named Junie Harris and Blue Gamble, but they weren't actually like the boys in the story with those names. But those stories about Blue are true stories, just about a boy with a different name.

What about writing your kids' stories on a paper bag instead of using a reader?

Now that is a great question. I always had a chalkboard in my classroom so I never needed to use a paper bag. But I started learning to teach when I was 17, and I learned from the beginning to write the children's own stories down and let them read those stories back to me. And it was Miss Seppy who invented that way of teaching, fifty years before I learned it! That was her idea!

Wait... Miss Seppy is real?

Mrs. Septima Clark was a public school teacher in South Carolina for forty years. She was fired because she refused to stop fighting for civil rights, and they took her retirement away from her, too. But then she started teaching citizenship schools and training other people to teach, including adults who had only just learned to read. Martin Luther King, Jr. called her the Mother of the Movement.

She was a friend of Martin Luther King?

Again, yes and no. They worked very closely together for years. But she also had to argue with him - a lot - because he and his friends thought that men should always be the leaders but she knew that women can be great leaders, too.

I'm confused now. Our teacher said your book is a novel. But now you're telling us all these things are true. So which is it: fiction or non-fiction?

That's another great question. My book is what you call historical fiction, meaning that it is a story based on true events of the past. I imagine some of the characters. I imagine most of the dialogue. But the larger events really happened.

So why didn't you just write the history?

These are the best questions. One reason is that I wanted these people from history to really come to life for you. Sometimes the best way to do that is fiction; sometimes fiction is more true in that way than non-fiction. Also, I wanted to connect different stories that really didn't connect in real life. Like when Miss Seppy asks Junie to tell a story. I wanted to show how a really good teacher brings the children's lives and ideas into the classroom instead of just telling them to be quiet and listen to her. In another chapter in this book a Native American teacher in South Dakota lets the children tell him stories in their own language and then asks them to write them in English. Then there's a chapter where a teacher in Texas asks the children to learn science by watching the weather and by looking at the birds and bugs in the field around the school. In real life these three teachers never met each other or talked about their ideas together. But by putting those chapters near each other in my book I hope you get some ideas about good teaching.

Can you read us another chapter?

Thank you so much for asking that! You really make me feel appreciated! But the truth is that I have to go visit the classroom next door and read to them. Maybe I can visit you again the next time I'm in Delaware. And thanks for your great welcome!

Virtual Book Tour -- Stop 2

I want to thank our hosts so much for opening their home to us this evening so that I can have the opportunity to read a little bit and to answer all your questions about my historical novel, Though An Army Come Against Us. I especially want to thank them for these cookies which are the bomb. I am trying not to eat all of them myself, but I am not having a lot of success. And, of course, I want to thank all of you for joining us here this evening. I hope you will enjoy my book.

I am going to read a little bit from the second chapter, which is a letter from Luther Standing Bear to Zitkala Sa. Here goes:

When I first graduated from Carlisle Indian School I worked as an assistant teacher on the Rosebud reservation, where much of my family lives. I was a new and inexperienced teacher so I followed the same monkey-see-monkey-do approach they used with me when I was in school. Like me, my students would repeat all these words and phrases in English, but their actual meanings were obscure, and often referred to a world the children didn’t even know. You know all those memorized dialogues about ordering a meal in a restaurant and asking directions to the opera? I see this clearly now, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, but I didn’t understand any of it back then. 

Back then I truly believed that once we mastered the white people’s learning we would be welcome to enter into their world. I thought I had personal evidence of this: when I was a student at Carlisle I worked summers at Wanamaker’s Department Store in Philadelphia. Every summer my hard work earned me a promotion. Returning home to Rosebud, I immediately got what seemed to be a great job as a teaching assistant. I thought opportunities were opening to me. I believed that I could provide even better opportunities for my pupils.

Then the agent at the Pine Ridge Reservation asked me to transfer from Rosebud to the Allen school near Wagmíza Wakpála: as head teacher, not assistant! I thought everything was going perfectly, and I was confident that I could be a better teacher than the wašíčus from the moment I took over my own classroom. After all, I am Lakota, just like my students; that would be an immediate bond between us. I speak their language; I wouldn’t have to waste time pantomiming to make myself understood. But it did not work out that way. Not at all. Being head teacher turned out to be more of a test than I ever imagined. I was doing no better at reaching the children than the white teachers.

At first I thought the problem was my suit and my short hair. But thinking about those things didn’t help me make any progress in the classroom. And, truly, I failed to see just how accurately my white man’s clothes and white man’s haircut represented my inner state at the time.

Don’t you find that the best moments in a teacher’s day begin with digressions and misunderstandings? That’s how it happened with me, anyway. One day I was reciting a dialogue in English – with appropriate gestures, of course – about doffing one’s cap when being introduced to a stranger. One of the big boys, a kind of class clown, always pretended to mishear and misunderstand what I said. I still remember his name, Isaac Iron Cloud, and in my mind I can see his laughing face. It occurs to me now that his ability to joke may have shown that he understood the words better than any of his more cooperative classmates! They were all, as I said, simply repeating everything I said, like a flock of parrots.

Anyway, there I was, bowing from the waist and taking off my imaginary cap. Suddenly Isaac asked, in Lakȟótiyapi, “Why do you have a beaver on your head?” He was punning on the Lakota word for “beaver”, which, as you know, sounds a little like “cap.” 

I’m sure that Corn Creek, like all those creeks in South Dakota, used to have lots of beavers. But by the time I was a teacher they were pretty much trapped out for their furs. So I asked, in Lakȟótiyapi, “How many of you here have ever seen a beaver?”  A couple of the boys surprised me by raising their hands. And that made me wonder to myself, What do I really know about any of these children other than what I observe in the classroom?  Then, just when I thought we were as far away from the lesson plan as possible, a quiet girl, Esther Big Owl, took us even farther. She said, also in Lakȟótiyapi, “I know the story of how Iktómi captured Beaver.”

I had a moment of clarity. Why were we performing dialogues about taking off caps, and serving tea with biscuits, and asking for directions to the nearest train station? I said, “Esther, tell us that story.” Most of the class already knew how Iktómi, the spider, tricked the beaver into thinking there was something dangerous in the water, and how he clubbed Beaver when he got near the shore. They had heard it from their own grandparents. But they all listened with great attention to Esther’s account.

Then I told them, “Open your notebooks. Everybody write the story of Čhápa and Iktómi in English.” Jaws dropped. Loud protests erupted. This was unheard of.  English was for school and the agent’s office. Lakȟótiyapi was for home and for the fields. Were there even words in English to tell this story? But I insisted, “In your notebooks!” So they picked up their pencils and began – laboriously, and with a lot of hushed conversation – to struggle through this task. I had never seen them so engaged. I had never seen them learning so much.

Next day, as soon as class began, Amos Yellow Thunder raised his hand and asked if he could tell the story about why we hunt the buffalo instead of the buffalo hunting us. Now remember, like the beaver, the buffalo herds were long gone by then. Nobody was actually hunting buffalo. But Amos knew the story of the Great Race between the two-leggeds and the four-leggeds that was run on Khiíŋyaŋka Očháŋku and how Magpie beat Buffalo. Again I asked them all to write the story in their notebooks in English. Again they all set to work with great intensity. This time I asked who would read their English version aloud. Amos did, haltingly, to both laughter and applause from his classmates.

Isaac Iron Cloud, the class clown, raised his hand and I groaned inwardly. What now? But he wasn’t making jokes. He said, “The Great Race is a good story. But I heard that the reason ptéȟčaka give us their meat is because of a cow buffalo who married a man.”

I had him save that very strange story for the next day. We still had to fit in our required lessons, especially arithmetic. And I had Isaac tell that story to the class in English too, but, again, only after everybody had written it out in English.

I did not yet understand why this was going so well. I only knew that I felt like a much better teacher when all my students were working so hard. I remembered an experience from my student years. It seemed to be related, although at the time I wasn’t sure why. One day an astronomer came to visit us at Carlisle. During an assembly he informed the entire student body that there would be an eclipse of the moon the very next week. In the auditorium, under the eyes of our teachers, we all listened to this preposterous statement in respectful silence. Later, back in the dorms, we mocked him mercilessly.

All the boys knew stories of haŋwí, the light of the night, crossing áŋpawí, the light of the day, and causing darkness in the daytime. In fact, there had been a solar eclipse the summer after I was born; by our calendar waníyetu áŋpawí waŋ t’e, the year the sun died.   So it was clear to us that such a thing as an eclipse was possible. But we were very certain that no wašíču could predict such a thing. Or we were certain… until the eclipse came on exactly the day he said it would! I remember that eclipse because that was the day when I decided that I had to take my school learning seriously. That day I saw that there was an actual connection between things the teachers said in school and the real world. And by “real world” I mean the real world of earth and sky, not just railroads and cities and things made by the wašíčus.

In my classroom at the Allen School I moved on from the stories to talking about the weather and about the plants and about the night sky. In Lakȟótiyapi, as you know, these aren’t separate things. The constellation tȟayámni pȟá is the origin of humanity as well as a group of stars. The big storms of spring and summer are incomprehensible to us without knowing about the wakíŋyaŋ, the thunder spirits. What worked so well was showing the children that the things they knew – things their grandparents taught them! – were important enough to discuss in the classroom. And, vice versa, that the classroom was a place where important things could be discussed! We learned that the real world could be discussed in English. We moved back and forth between Lakȟótiyapi and English, showing that they didn’t have to abandon one world in order to enter the other.

This was a learning experience for me, too. After all my years in school, it turned out there were lots of English words I didn’t know. For example, in Lakȟótiyapi I could easily tell the difference between the great pȟeháŋǧila and the tiny tȟanáǧila. I could even distinguish between the hokȟátȟo and the very similar-looking pȟeháŋ ská. In English, though, they were all just birds to me. I realized that I didn’t know one grass from another in English, either. But in Lakȟótiyapi every one of us knew dozens of grasses: hupȟéstola, pȟeží šašá ókhihe tȟaŋkíŋkiŋyaŋ, sipȟáwičhakaše, wápaha kamnímnila pȟeží, pȟeží wakȟáŋ… and on and on.

It was just about that time that your friend Mrs. Elaine Eastman came to visit us at the school. She was then the superintendent for all Indian schools in both North and South Dakota. Mrs. Eastman quizzed the students aloud on their English and was amazed at our progress. She said the children in our little school were learning so much faster than any others that she wanted to know the secret of our progress! I kept it a secret, though, because I was pretty sure that she and her superiors in Washington would not be happy if they knew what I was doing. Shortly after that visit I received a formal letter of commendation, citing me as one of the finest teachers in the Lakota schools. I was so proud.

Not for long! Just a few days later I got the results of the new civil service examination for teachers. I had failed, along with every Indian teacher in the reservation schools! And then I received another letter from Mrs. Eastman, a letter firing me, even though the ink was barely dry on her letter commending me for doing better than all the wašíču teachers.

Every Indian teacher in the reservation schools was fired. We were all replaced by wašíčus who passed the test, wašíčus who had book knowledge but knew nothing of the lives of our students. Speaking honestly, most of them knew nothing even of the wašíču world outside of books. The man who replaced me broke his leg by putting it between the spokes of his wagon’s wheel. He thought that was a good way to keep it from picking up too much speed driving down a hill!

Thank you for that. Thank you. So, any questions?

I have one. Is this a real person?

Yes. Luther Standing Bear was a Lakota Indian who lived from the buffalo days almost to World War Two. Today he is best known for the four autobiographies he wrote but at the time the novel takes place he was working as an actor. Standing Bear was a little boy at the Battle of Little Big Horn and a young teacher at the time of the Wounded Knee Massacre. He performed in Wild West shows across the United States and in Europe and then for two more decades in Hollywood films.

And the person he was writing to?

Zitkala-Ša, 1898

Zitkala-Ša. Yes, she was real, too. She was a Yankton Dakota Indian who attended Earlham College in Iowa. She was also well-known in her time, as a musician, a writer, an educator, and as a political activist. She was an associate of Luther Standing Bear's brother Henry.

Were they actual correspondents?

I have no idea, and I have no reason to think so. They traveled in slightly different circles, but both were both Native intellectuals who worked hard to imagine a place for Native people in the United States in the twentieth century so I chose picture them writing to one another about their ideas.

Why did you choose to write about this - about them - at all?

Sure. That's a fair question. If you're like most people, what you know about Native Americans comes from a high school history class and from some Western movies. You may have heard about Custer's Last Stand, the Battle of Little Big Horn. If you had a teacher who was interested you may have heard about the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. But then Native people probably disappeared entirely from your class and from your textbook. They have certainly not disappeared from the country. So I think it's worthwhile wondering what was going on with them around the time of the novel, around the time of the First World War. And I certainly think it's worth telling that through Native eyes.

I'm wondering about all those words you use. Are they made up, like Klingon or Dothraki? (Laughter)

No, that language is not made up. Lakota and Dakota are mutually-intelligible languages with several thousand native speakers. People today are working hard to make sure they do not vanish by teaching them to adults and children. When I began working on this book I used a print dictionary of the Lakota language. By the time I was doing my final edits I was using the online app of the Lakota Language Consortium.

Why did you bother? How many Lakota speakers did you expect to be reading this book?

The point isn't about a few words. It certainly isn't about me confusing my readers with words they don't know or about me showing off that I discovered a dictionary. It is about an entire culture, an entire life of the mind that loses something in translation. That's why I made the point about all the different kinds of grass. That's why I have the kids working on the stories they hear from their grandparents in the lodges.

Luther Standing Bear as a
student at the Carlisle School

Did Luther Standing Bear make this kind of theoretical leap in his teaching practice? 

Not really. He did translate back and forth from English to Lakota when he was a teacher. But it wasn't until the early 1930's, long after he had given up his classroom, that he publicly advocated bilingual instruction and teaching Native subjects in the schools. He was very conscious of the failures of the white teachers to understand and respect his kids. He was very conscious of how he looked to the kids with his short haircut and suit. And that story about the eclipse? That's true. He told it in his book My People, the Sioux.

So why did you include this at all? Isn't it just an anachronism, imagining people a hundred years ago having twenty-first century thoughts?

Not at all! In the very next chapter I introduce the character of Septima Poinsette, a teenager and a novice elementary teacher in coastal South Carolina. She grew up to be Septima Clark, who Martin Luther King called "the mother of the movement." And she developed precisely those ideas - of teaching the children reading by having them dictate their own stories - way back there during the First World War. It was the basis for the Freedom Schools and the Citizenship Schools fifty years later, but she had already developed that practice. I am a teacher. I was a teacher for twenty-five years before I ever gave a thought to becoming a principal. In writing the chapters about teachers in this book I looted my journals for my own experiences when I was a rookie. When I write about the best moments in a teacher's day coming from tangents and misunderstandings? That was my experience as a teacher and that was my experience coaching teachers, too. I'll say one more thing about this. I think it's really important to get the idea that teaching across cultures has to be more than indoctrination. The teacher has to see the value in the lives and relationships of the kids and their parents. Otherwise, why should they have any respect for the teacher?

Did all the Native teachers really get fired?

Yes, they did. That testing thing is a very old trick. As soon as you are assigned a numerical score it looks so objective. Who can argue with that number? In actuality it is entirely a matter of what questions are asked and how are they worded. Later in the book Luther Standing Bear writes his brother Henry about Henry's friend Chauncey Yellow Robe who was still working in the schools. But Yellow Robe was essentially a truant officer, tracking students who escaped from the boarding school back to their homes on the reservation. It's also worth mentioning that the superintendent who fired Standing Bear, Elaine Eastman, was married to a Santee Dakota man who was the physician at the Pine Ridge reservation where Standing Bear taught school. And Dr. Charles Eastman was fired, too. He was replaced by a white man, too. But that's a subject for another chapter of my book.

Why did you choose the story of a Lakota?

That's just this character and this plot thread. Elsewhere in the novel you can read about Muskogee Creek Indians in Oklahoma and Apache Indians in Arizona. It's a long and complicated book. Now I think we should break so people who want can get their copies signed. If anybody wants to purchase a copy, I have a stack right here. Also, I think I need more cookies.

My Virtual Book Tour

Hi! I'm Rick Levine, author of the historical novel Though An Army Come Against Us! Welcome to my virtual book tour!

I'll do some reading, I'll answer some questions, and - with a little luck - I can interest you in my book.

Let's get to it!

The book opens on a train in Oklahoma in May, 1921.

The spy awoke with a start as the train slowed just outside Vinita. He felt a momentary impulse to check for his badge and gun – could someone have taken them while he was napping? – but restrained himself. Somebody might see him. Who knew who his fellow passengers were? This trip would be wasted if he revealed his identity before even arriving.
In the heat and the dust of Oklahoma in late May, Special Agent James Amos had fallen asleep on the hardwood train seat: body twisted, mouth wide open. He turned his head from side to side to get the crick out of his neck and swallowed a few times to moisten his dry throat.

The front half of this Jim Crow “combination” rail car was filled with shipping crates, trunks, and suitcases. Here in the back half, every Negro on the entire train was packed into the bench seats along with him. While they were boarding in St. Louis, Amos glanced through the windows of the coach car behind them, where all the whites and Indians were sitting in padded comfort. He wondered, Why did Indians get to ride with white people out here?

Outside the train the oak trees and limestone cuts of the Ozarks had given way to the grass and flat prairie of eastern Oklahoma. He saw miles and miles of recently tilled fields, delicate green sprouts already visible, but still difficult to identify as cotton plants. The oil rigs, though, were unmistakable. There were hundreds of them, as far as he could see. There were more millionaires here than on Wall Street! Or so they said. 27¢ cotton and $2-a-barrel oil? Either way it was a bonanza and this was surely the Promised Land.

Three days earlier, Special Agent Amos, the sole full-time Negro employee at the Bureau of Investigation, had been polishing Director Hoover’s shoes at Hoover’s mother’s home on Seward Square. Other agents of the Bureau – white agents – mowed the lawn, washed the windows and painted the fence, but John Hoover often said, “You, James, are the only one I trust with my wardrobe.” Amos knew that the Director’s trust extended far beyond shoes, suits and ties. Amos, like Hoover, came from a long-time Washington, D.C. family and Amos knew that John Hoover had “a little something in him.” Hoover knew that Amos knew and was confident that he would keep it quiet. And that was not young John Hoover’s only secret.

That day Hoover, wearing a bathrobe and slippers, walked quietly into the dressing room where Special Agent Amos was applying a final buffing to a pair of wing-tip oxfords. “Excellent work, as always, James,” complimented the Director.

“Thank you, Mr. Hoover.”

“As soon as you are finished I have a job for you in Oklahoma.”

“The lynching?”

“No,” frowned Hoover. “You won’t be able to help investigate there. That ignorant class of Negroes in the country towns will only speak to white agents.”

Amos kept his mouth shut and his expression flat. John Hoover was a brilliant man; his appointment to head the Bureau of Investigation at such a young age was proof. But he had a habit of strongly expressing some very stupid ideas, and this was among the stupidest. Did he even believe it himself? It really didn’t matter, because the Director had no interest in making arrests or preparing prosecutions in lynchings anyway. The all-white teams of agents never asked, “Did you see any members of the lynch mob? Did you recognize any of them?” Their only question was always the same: “Which Negroes fired guns?” So the Director’s actual assignment for Special Agent James Amos came as no surprise to him.

“We have reports from Tulsa that militants styling themselves an African Blood Brotherhood are arming themselves to launch attacks on white people. We want you to go in and find them. And remember, no arrests until we find the actual troublemakers. It might be Jamaicans from New York City, but we suspect white radicals. Look for evidence of anarchists or IWWs. We don’t think it’s likely that these country Negroes came up with this idea on their own. And by all means, look for explosive devices.

”Anarchists. IWWs. The Justice Department, the Bureau of Investigation, Director Hoover… none of them could imagine Negroes organizing themselves. That had been the problem with Special Agent Amos’s reports from New York on Marcus Garvey. He spied on Garvey and his associates for months, pretending to be a militant himself and worming his way into the upper ranks of the organization. He filed pages and pages of reports – both stolen internal documents and records of his own surveillance – but the Bureau wasn’t satisfied because the only Reds who Amos discovered were Hubert Harrison and Cyril Briggs… and they were Negroes, too, not the white agitators that John Hoover was looking for.

And why did it have to be launching attacks on white people? Since the end of the World War, white attacks on colored people had grown in size and frequency. In the summer of 1919, thousands of white people invaded Chicago’s South Side, burning homes and businesses, beating the colored people they caught, and killing twenty-five. That fall, white mobs rampaged through the Arkansas Delta and murdered over two hundred colored people. Then they held jury trials for another hundred and sentenced many of them to hang, apparently for the crime of surviving the initial pogrom. In central Florida, a white mob burned out an entire Black community. That crowd killed over fifty people, and mutilated their bodies, too. Could it be that this “Blood Brotherhood” was arming in self-defense?

James Amos shared none of these thoughts with the Director. He showed no sign of them on his face, either. If Hoover directed him to shine shoes, he would shine shoes. If Hoover directed him to look for white radicals, he would. He was an agent. In all his years working for Theodore Roosevelt, Amos kept his opinions to himself, and did what he was asked: carrying confidential messages abroad, being a personal bodyguard, entertaining the President’s children, sitting by Roosevelt’s bedside as he took his last breath. He served because he trusted Roosevelt the man. John Hoover was not Mr. Roosevelt. He did not have Teddy’s common touch, his spontaneity, or his instinct for fun. But John Hoover was devoted to his work and Amos respected that. So when he received these new instructions he didn’t question them. He only asked, “Files at the office?”

Thank you! Thank you for that nice reception. So, are there any questions? Yes. 

I'm really puzzled that you would have a Black FBI agent in, you said 1921? I mean, 100 years ago, at the height of Jim Crow? Even in the 1970's J. Edgar Hoover was still a notorious white supremacist. Wouldn't he have been worse in the 1920's? When Woodrow Wilson was President from 1913 to 1921 he segregated Washington, DC and purged the federal government of Black employees. So, a Black agent?

Well, yes, there was. And his name was James Amos. By the way, it was the Bureau of Investigation then. It was reorganized as the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935.

And he was really sent to Oklahoma to investigate African American radicals in 1921?

No, that detail is fictional. Amos started at the Bureau in August 1921, three months after I imagine him on duty in Oklahoma. But he was assigned to investigate Black radicals.

So J. Edgar Hoover hired a Black agent?

Not exactly. In 1921 Hoover was the Deputy Director. William J. Burns headed the Bureau and one of his first hires was Amos, who had been working for him at the Burns Detective Agency. Hoover didn't take over the Bureau until 1924.

So who was James Amos?

Amos worked in the Theodore Roosevelt White House in a private capacity for the President himself. He did everything I describe in the novel, from babysitting the children to acting as a

covert international operative. Later he worked as an investigator in the US Customs House in downtown Manhattan and for the Department of the Interior. When Roosevelt passed away in 1919 at his home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, James Amos was sitting at his bedside. The newspapers reported that he was a family retainer, but Amos was much more.

He remained at the Bureau of Investigation even after Burns had to step down because of his involvement in the Teapot Dome Affair. During his 32-year career with the Bureau he worked mainly as a firearms and ballistics expert. But he also investigated several important cases. He was deeply involved in bringing in Louis Buchalter of Murder, Inc. in the 1930's and breaking up the Fritz Duquesne Nazi spy ring in the early 1940's.

We know about the FBI spying on Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party in the 1960's. Were they really spying on the Black movement way back in the 1920's?

Yes, absolutely. And Special Agent Amos was at the center of that. He led the Bureau's investigation of Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association in the 1920's. For the purpose of my novel I moved this in time to before Amos's fictional assignment to Oklahoma.

Marcus Garvey? I thought that was a mail fraud case, about a financial scam.

Marcus Garvey

Well, that's the way most high school history books tell the story. In fact, Marcus Garvey was the leading Black political figure of the 1920's. He founded the UNIA in Jamaica in 1914 and introduced it to the United States in 1916. In 1920 the UNIA held its first convention at Madison Square Garden with 20,000 delegates in attendance.

The UNIA was popular throughout Black America. If you are interested in this undertold story I highly recommend Grassroots Garveyism by Mary Rolinson which emphasizes the spread of the movement through the rural South, where the overwhelming majority of African Americans lived in 1920.

So why was the FBI investigating them?

I suppose you could ask the same question about Martin Luther King. If you view the Jim Crow system - segregation, disfranchisement, and sharecropping - as an unfortunate leftover of old customs, then it could seem strange that the federal government opposed Black organizations. But if you see the suppression of African American people as central to the US economy and to white American identity it's a different story. Then every struggle for equality starts to look subversive. The federal government was determined to find some sort of crime in Garvey's activity. They managed to charge him with mail fraud because he advertised stock in a steamship line prior to acquiring the ships. He was convicted, imprisoned in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, and then deported to Jamaica, where he had been born.

How did you find all this out?

Much of what we know today about the workings of the UNIA is from the reports filed by James Amos and James Wormley Jones, another Black agent known in the files as "800." This prequel to the FBI's attacks on the Black liberation movement is discussed in Theodore Kornweibel's Seeing Red.

You said something about them looking for white socialists? But only finding other Black radicals? Are they real, too?

I mention other Black radicals of the period. Cyril Briggs and Hubert Harrison were Harlem

Cyril Briggs

socialists who were also closely monitored by both federal and local law enforcement. The best work on Harrison is Jeffrey Perry's biography. I allude in the novel to the African Blood

Hubert Harrison

Brotherhood which was founded by Briggs. The best work I know on that is still in Ted Vincent's 1971 Black Power and the Garvey Movement.

What about that thing you say about FBI agents asking "Which Negroes fired guns?" Why would they ask that question if they were investigating lynchings of Black people?

I think that's a great question. I still think that's a great question today. Look at the cases of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. The police and the press search for a firearm or for some kind of reason for a policeman or a vigilante to have killed a young Black man. Then when that doesn't work, they repeat the same tired and irrelevant trope: "He was no angel," as if extrajudicial execution is justified for somebody who once cut class or smoked a little weed. And they always express worry that marches for justice may "turn" violent, as if no violent act took place in the original murders!


I'm stuck on something else. Why would you have an FBI agent shining J. Edgar Hoover's shoes?

Actually, Director Hoover was notorious for assigning agents to do personal chores for him, totally unrelated to their job descriptions, like cutting the grass and painting the fence at the Seward Square house he inherited from his mom. I have no idea what inappropriate tasks he gave Amos. But it fit Hoover and it fit Amos's experience with Teddy Roosevelt, too: valet/bodyguard/confidential agent.

What about these little sly statements about Hoover that you put in Agent Amos's mouth. How did you put it? "Hoover had a little something in him"?

You might call that the rumor that J. Edgar Hoover had some Black ancestry. White agents in the Bureau were fond of speculating about his appearance. They also knew that every one of them had to undergo a scrupulous background check including their parentage. But Hoover, who was born in Washington, DC in 1895, somehow had no birth certificate until the

J. Edgar Hoover in the 20's

1940's. In the African American community I would characterize the conversation differently. The stories there that Hoover had "a little something in him" came from people whose parents told them that he was a relative, but that they were never to speak of it. I have no evidence that James Amos knew anything about this. But he was fifteen years older than Hoover, his dad was a DC cop, and the city had only about a quarter of a million people when Hoover was born. Only about 75,000 of them were Black. I find it easy to imagine that Amos would know that Hoover's family "crossed." I find it easy to imagine that he would stay quiet about it.

You also say that was not young John Hoover's only secret.

Clint Eastwood dealt with all that in his film "J. Edgar" so it's not really a secret anymore, is it? The movie shows a whole unusually close friendship between Leo DiCaprio as Hoover

and Armie Hammer as Associate Director Clyde Tolson. Hoover and Tolson shared a home, traveled together on vacation and often wore matching outfits. Agency employees

Hoover and Tolson at the beach, 1939

speculated about this relationship, too. I'll just say that, by itself, it is no more of a problem than his racial background. But you put it together with the way he directed the Bureau it becomes a totally different story. You look at a person with African heritage whoconducted endless attacks on Black leaders. You look at a person who lived his whole private life with another man - his direct work subordinate! - who obsessed about other people's "unnatural" sexual proclivities, and who had his agents investigate other peoples' private lives. It paints a picture.

Can you tell us why you chose to write about all this?

I think that's too big a question for the time we have. But I will be here for a while autographing books and I'll be happy to keep talking to whoever wants to stay. Thanks so much for joining us tonight! And I hope you enjoy my book! There are copies to purchase over there on that table.

Hoover and Tolson ringside
Joe Louis-Jack Sharkey fight
Yankee Stadium, 1936

Dawson 1913

Cañada de los Álamos, New Mexico

1913

When, exactly, had this become a village of women, youngsters, and the elderly? Piedad Abeyta stopped near a patch of late-blooming juve, arrested in her work by the thought. She was out on the mesa above town when it hit her, gathering contrayerba, matarique, and mastranzo for her practice. The fiesta of San Lucas was in a few days and that meant harvest season was over. Corn, squash, berries, chiles and apples were all in; the men were all away. Some were cutting lumber for railroad ties, many were mining coal, a few were already tending beets, but not one wife in Cañada de los Álamos had her husband with him.

No, she thought, that wasn’t quite true. Seferina Trujillo, Cleotilde Vigil and Choni Maestas all had their husbands with them… just not here. All those women had left the village in order to be with their men. Seferina was with Benigno at the Phelps, Dodge coal mine in Dawson. The others were at the Rockefeller coal mines in Colorado, along with her Epifanio. Oh, and of course there were the viejos who no longer worked. They were sitting in the sun together, talking about old times, resolaniando. But none of the young men were here. None of the working men were here. None of them would be back before Christmas.  When had all this happened? When Piedad was a girl, all the working-age men were here, farming, herding, and weaving. Well, all except her wandering brother José. Now all the village men had become itinerant workers like Joey.

She sat down for a moment to consider the village in the valley from this vantage point. No sooner had she stopped moving than she heard the sound of iron-shod hoofs on the rocky trail below and little Silbestre Jaramillo rode into view on his family’s roan mare. This had to be about his mother’s cousin, Raquel. It was still early – Piedad hadn’t expected her to go into labor before November – but it was Raquel’s first baby. Maybe she was just nervous. In any case, Piedad would have to drop what she was doing here and check in on the young mother-to-be. She gathered her things.

Silbestre was not here about a birth, though. “There was a telephone call,” he said as soon as he got close enough to speak. That could not be good. The nearest telephone was at the railroad station in La Vega. Calls meant trouble. “They need you in Dawson,” added Silbestre. Dawson? Something with Seferina? she wondered. But she put away her anxiety. It would take time to travel. Dawson had to be a hundred miles away and worrying would not make the trip faster. Piedad climbed up behind the twelve-year old and rode down to the village.

The grown-ups in town were no more informative. Old Bonifacio Vigil was sitting out in front of his little tendejón with his cronies, Don Apolonio, Don Faustín and Don Porfirio. As soon as Piedad got off Silbestre’s yegua and thanked him with a small coin, the grocer was up and gesturing toward the north. “Dawson!” he said. “There is trouble in Dawson!” 

“What kind of trouble?” asked the partera. “A pregnancy?”

“Trouble!” repeated Don Bonifacio. “Elías Martínez said that Gilberto Naranjo got a telephone call!”

This information was all useless. She wanted to know who called, not who received the call. She wanted to know who was the patient they were calling about, whether it was a birth or a medical emergency. She really wanted to know why they were calling her so far away, to Dawson. There were plenty of other parteras and curanderas between here and there. Hadn’t Genara Lucero moved to Dawson? “What was the message?” she asked the men.

Don Bonifacio looked at her in disbelief. “Trouble!” he shouted, as if she were hard of hearing. “In Dawson!”

Why had she thought this resolanero could answer her questions? There would be more information at the train station. Piedad nodded and thanked Don Bonifacio, then went to her house. She packed both her healing bag and her midwife bag into the valise where she always kept a change of clothes for overnight calls and she folded in an additional change of undergarments. Dawson was far; she might be away an extra day. Then she went next door to tell her mother-in-law that she would be out of town. Doña Luz promised to take care of the children for as long as necessary. In the old days this would have been the responsibility of Pia’s comai, but in this new world? Choni was up in Colorado with the men. Choni’s children were with her mother.

Piedad saddled her golondrino and tied on her valise. The only child she could find quickly was eight-year-old Anita García, so she hoisted her up in front of the saddle and asked Doña Luz to inform Consolación. Anita’s mother would never object to Piedad asking her daughter to bring the horse back home from the train station in La Vega, but she did have to be told and Piedad was running out of time if she wanted to make the 2:30 train. 

Finally, sitting on the Denver and Rio Grande narrow-gauge for the two-hour ride to Santa Fe, there was time to think about what she had learned from the telegraph operator: a mine accident in Dawson. They were calling for help from all over, so there was no particular reason to think that her neighbor Benigno Trujillo was hurt. The wait at the station in Santa Fe and the northbound ride on the AT&SF passed without incident. But there were a lot of anxious people waiting for the transfer to the El Paso and Southwestern at the depot in French. The closer she got to Dawson, the more her dread returned. 

The town of Dawson, up the canyon from French, was dominated by two huge smokestacks and a towering steel-framed mine entrance, bigger than even the cathedral in Santa Fe. Every man in town was working to excavate the collapsed mine entry. More miners had come from as far as eastern Kansas to help with the rescue efforts. Piedad went to a large tent where an Anglo man in a suit asked, “Are you a miner’s wife?”

“Nurse,” she answered, knowing that the gabachos only understood their own medical credentials.

“Over there,” he said, pointing to an area of empty cots. “We are still waiting for the first patients to be brought in.”

Waiting. There was nothing to do but wait. Where were the victims?

As the assembled doctors prepared their equipment, Piedad spoke to the other curanderas and nurses who had been summoned to deal with this disaster. Over 250 men had descended into the Phelps, Dodge #2 pit the previous morning to dig coal for the big coking ovens. In mid-afternoon, the people of this boomtown heard what sounded like a very loud rifle shot, followed by a deafening roar. Then they saw flames leaping into the sky as high as the surrounding hills. Crews from other shifts and other shafts ran in as far as they could to attempt a rescue, but they were forced to retreat when some of them dropped dead from lack of air. The ventilators would have to be restored before they could return.

So far, only 15 men had made it out. As the day turned into night and the electricians set up emergency lighting Piedad began to wonder if there would be any more. One by one, the crews were bringing out bodies – some charred by flames, some broken by rock fall, some asphyxiated and looking asleep – but there was nobody to care for in this hospital tent. And she was wondering, too, where were the women? There was very little English spoken here for what she had imagined in a corporation town like Dawson, and not much Spanish, either. She didn’t recognize the languages. And the mourners, those crying over the corpses, seemed to be almost all men.

Piedad wasn’t sure what time it was when she dropped off to sleep sitting in that makeshift hospital, but as dawn awakened her, surrounded by dozing nurses and doctors, her fear returned: what if there were no living souls to rescue? She went outside to find that the electricians had returned the big fans to service, pulling air through the underground tunnels. The miners, working in oversized relays, had cleared the debris from the mine entry. Rescue crews were reentering the works. She saw men who had worked through the night to reopen the mine collapsed on the ground in exhaustion. So. There was work for her anyway.

Retrieving her healing bag from the hospital tent, Piedad took a bucket of water and a ladle and began walking from one man to the next. Some were fast asleep. She touched their throats for a pulse and their foreheads for a fever and moved on. Some had visible injuries from the haste and darkness in which they had worked. She applied the appropriate balms and dressings of romerillo del llano and añil del muerto. Some showed symptoms of susto: they gazed into a distance that was visible only to them; they sat crying. She gave them water into which she stirred yerbanis and yerbabuena. All of them would need more treatment later, but this was a beginning and – if she was honest with herself – it felt better to be doing something than nothing.

Like all the others, the sleeping man she approached now was coated in coal dust. His face, his hands, his clothing, and his boots looked like a statue carved from rock, or perhaps a formation from deep under the earth. Nevertheless, she stopped before him and she looked at him, her brow furrowed until something – her staring? – woke him up. His eyes, and his astonishment at seeing her there, confirmed her unconscious intuition: it was Epifanio. It was her husband. It was the father of her children. Why, though, was he here? Wasn’t he supposed to be up in Colorado?

Epifanio leaped from the ground and embraced her as if the two of them were alone, as if all the dozens of other people present had vanished from his view. “Oh, how I miss you, mi amor!” he said with passion. Three weeks ago when he came home for the fiesta of San Gabriel he hadn’t been this affectionate. And that time it had been almost six months since his last visit. She welcomed the tenderness, but questioned it, too. What had he seen underground last night to trigger all this emotion?

He still wasn’t letting her go, either. “I miss you so much!” he repeated. He was sobbing now. “Don’t leave me, cariño! Don’t leave me!” Leave him? He was the one who kept running off to find cash work outside the village. She was the one at home taking care of their children and of his parents. What was he talking about?

“All gone!” he was crying now. “They’re all gone!”

Piedad was afraid she knew exactly what he meant. Nevertheless, she asked, “Who? Who is all gone?”

“They’re all gone!” Epifanio said again. “All those men! Dead! They killed them!”

“Killed?” asked Piedad, pushing him away. “Who? Who killed who?” She thought this was an accident. Why was he talking about killing?

He looked around wildly, as if to see who was listening to them. She looked around, too, although she didn’t know why. Nobody was paying any attention to them at all. But now Epifanio began speaking in hushed tones, “The company,” he whispered. “They don’t care if we live or die. Lose a Greek; replace him with an Italian.”

This made no sense to her at all. Greeks? Italians? What was he talking about? Had he lost his mind? And what was he doing here? “Amor,” she whispered back, trying to calm him, “everything will be okay.”

“Okay?” he asked sharply, and drew back from her as if she were a stranger. She might look like one now, too, she thought, covered as she was with the coal dust that he had transferred to her face and clothes during their embrace. But it wasn’t her appearance that shocked him. “How is any of this okay?” he asked, waving his hand around. His gesture took in the entire horror that surrounded them, the burnt-out mine buildings, the row of corpses, the weeping survivors. He was right. None of this would – or even could – be okay.

“Amor,” she asked, changing the subject, “how are you here?”

This question calmed him considerably. Good. “We heard about the blast in Colorado,” he answered. “We came right away.”

This answer raised new questions for Piedad, but their conversation ended right there because a shout went up from the mine entrance. The men she had been tending to earlier now all jumped up, joined by others who had been waiting all around them. People were coming out of the mine. Would she be needed now in the hospital tent?

She would not. There were only more corpses. “George Gelasakis!” shouted a man as he set down a new body in the line of bodies that had started the night before. Hearing that name, several men fell to their knees, crossing themselves and saying something that sounded like, “Agios athanatos, eleison imas.”

Then another name: “Umberto Giordani!” More kneeling, more crossing. She heard some say, “Riposare in pace.”

“Antonio Bediali!”

“Luigi Marinucci!”

“Duilio Zamboni!”

“Mike Cachulakis!”

And on and on. There were a few Negros. She couldn’t say for sure whether the people who ran to those bodies were relatives or friends. There were many New Mexicans, most of whom seemed to have wives and children weeping over their bodies. Jesus Reyes. Patrocinio Chavez. Felipe García. But the vast majority of the names she heard were unfamiliar. And the mourners for those apparently foreign names were overwhelmingly other young men.

“Gus Katis!”

“Giuseppe Nava!”

“Dominic Bruglioni!”

It was as if the roll call would never stop. Each name was accompanied by another broken body. She thought she could not bear anymore. But she had forgotten that there were men from Cañada de los Álamos working here at this mine.

“Benny Trujillo!” Benny Trujillo? Her neighbor Benigno Trujillo? She choked back a scream and stepped up to get a better look, taking Epifanio by the hand. It was true. Benny’s mother Teófila sat in the dirt, silent, with her son’s head cradled in her lap as if he were her sleeping infant. Her shawl was drawn up over her head and tears streamed down her cheeks. Benny’s wife Seferina stood behind Teófila, both arms reaching upward (to God? to Benny’s departing spirit?) howling wordlessly in protest against this insult. At Benny’s feet stood his friends, Sixto and Amarante. They had recovered his body from the mine. They looked beaten.

Piedad didn’t know what to say. She had something in her bag for labor pain and for menstrual cramps. She had something for diarrhea and something for snakebite. She had nothing for this, this… what was this? She gave Sixto her water bucket and a rag. He began cleaning the coal and rock dust from his friend’s body. 

Epifanio whispered hoarsely, “We will make them pay. We will make these malditos pay.”

There were already at least a hundred men’s bodies lined up on the ground now. More were coming out every minute. Smoke still hung in the air. Wasn’t this a terrible accident? What malditos? Who was going to pay?

Epifanio was now shuddering with grief and rage. Piedad took him in her arms to try to comfort him, but he could not stop shaking. She saw him looking up and down the unimaginably long line of broken men and their mourners. But she could only see the small tableau of Teófila holding her dead son Benigno while his wife wailed and his friend Sixto cleaned his body.