Tag Archives: genocide

Books, Intersections, Violence

King Blood, Jim Thompson’s Tulsa

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This contains the best goddamn description of Tulsa, Oklahoma you might ever find:

Tulsa lochopocas. A clanning place of the Osages. It stood at the twin-forks of the Arkansas, near the confluence of the Verdigris; a center of commerce (in so far as there was any) and a conference site long before white man ever set foot on the American continent. Tulsa lochopocas. Tulsey town. Tulsa. Critch had liked the looks of it from the moment he stepped off the train from Kansas City. It was a higgledy-piggledy kind of place, with streets running casually whatever way they damned pleased, and buildings sprawling and crawling all over hell and back in the ages-old pattern of quick money. It was his kind of town, he had thought. An easy-money town. A railroad and river town, a cotton and cattle town. Furs, lumber, foodstuffs. All flowed into and through Tulsa, an endless stream of increment. And now there was even oil, for prospectors with a spring-pole rig had drilled through the red-clay soil to a respectable gusher. In these surroundings, and without refining facilities, it had little commercial value as yet, being almost as worthless as some of those minerals you heard about only in books; uranium, for example. But never mind. There was plenty of money without oil, and the place virtually shouted the news that here one could do whatever he was big enough to do. Thus, Critch saw Tulsa. Correctly, he saw it so. What he did not see was something indefinable, something that far wiser and better men had failed to see at first glimpse of Tulsa (Tulsey Town,  tulsa lochopocas). Men who nominally were big enough to do whatever they attempted.

Even better than that:

More than two hundred years after her off-handed brushing-off of the French trappers and hunters, Tulsa was telling Wall Street to take its underwriting and financing and get hence (or words to that effect). The House of Morgan, et al., were amused rather than annoyed. The notion that an upstart Oklahoma town could itself raise the billions necessary for the proper exploitation of its oil resources was simply laughable. And yet… the upstart town _did_ raise those billions. Not only for itself but for others. And in the end, Wall Street was forced to admit that it had a rival. It remained first, in the big money capitals of the world, as a financier of the oil industry. But little Tulsa – or, rather, not-so-little Tulsa – ranked second to it. So there you were, then. There Tulsa was. A friendly town, an amiable live-and-let live town. A proud town, which liked doing things its own way and knew just what to do with those who would have it otherwise.

Go Tulsa, a town too little described in the annals of literature. sphere_king_bloodIn most other ways, however, Jim Thompson’s King Blood (1973) is offensive and fairly horribly over-the-top in its racism and misogyny. Usually in such accounts by whites of the West, Indians and Mexicans have stony black eyes, impassive faces, they are opaque and unknowable. This book almost makes you wish they had stayed that way for Thompson. At the same time, I confess, it is an interesting exploration of that intersection between pulp and race and manifest destiny. As a general fan of pulp covers I confess I find this grotesque. Where the fuck did they get that photograph. The actual snippets of history in here, though, are hell of interesting. Especially given that Jim Thompson’s father features in it as Sheriff James Sherman Thompson — also known familiarly as Jim Thompson. He’s typing away at an old typewriter when we first come across him. I don’t know why that gave me a shiver. I suppose it is not strange that as Thompson neared the end of his life, he should return to the land and times of his father. It makes the long author’s note near the end a little less incongruous, even stuck as it is in the flow of the text. It identifies the actual historical figures  — the Marshals, the murderesses, the politics of Oklahoma territory and Sheriff Thompson’s big fall from grace tumbling the family fortunes down with him. It admits that everything else — all that mixture of Apache and Creek and African-American blood on the land where Ike King reigns supreme and Apache and poor English is the lingua franca and a strange mixture of violence and hate rules day — all that is invented. What a strange invention though. I hated most things about it, hated the way the ‘squaws’ spoke, the mistaken writing of chango as chongo, the foul descriptions of Geronimo, the twisted ‘Indian’ codes, the scene of torture (that somehow inspired the publisher to chose that cover) and etc etc. Only the history lessons kept me reading, like this one of how the land of Ike’s kingdom was taken and held:

Arlie, Boz and Old Ike had all used their right to stake out homesteads of one-hundred-and-sixty acres. In addition, some fifth of Ike’s lighter-skinned Apache followers wearing city clothes had staked out claims of similar size. Like the Kings, however, they had not made the Run, the race for homesteads, but had ‘soonered’ the land, putting their stakes down on territory which Old Ike had held from the start. ‘You know what I mean, Critch? You savvy “sooner”?’ Critch nodded his understanding. A sooner was a person who slipped across the border ahead of the starter’s gun. In years to come, it was to become an affectionate second-name for Oklahoma – that is, ‘the Sooner state’ – as was Jayhawk to become a nickname for Kansas and Cornhusker for Nebraska. ‘O’ course,’ Arlie continued, ‘there was a lot of fuss about it. But I reckon you know it’d take more’n fuss to move Paw, an’ lucky for him he had the political pull to ride the storm through.’ ‘Good for him,’ Critch murmured. ‘But you’ve only accounted for a few thousand acres, Arlie. How did he recover the rest of his holdings?’ ‘With money,’ Arlie shrugged. ‘I mean, he bought up the homesteaders’ claims. A lot of ’em didn’t have the money to carry them through a bad year, an’ had to sell to Paw. The others – well, they got kind of nervous with so many Indians livin’ around ’em. Got the idea, somehow, that their scalps might wind up on a pole if they didn’t sell. So – ‘ ‘I see,’ Critch said. ‘I think I get the picture.’ ‘Now, don’t get no wrong ideas,’ his brother protested. ‘Maybe they had a leetle pressure put on ’em, but they all got a fair price for their claims. More’n they were worth in most cases. You wouldn’t remember, bein’ away so long, but a heap of the land out here just ain’t fit for nothing but grazin’.

A leetle pressure. Right…. It’s short, so I plowed through to the end, seeking that first promise of Tulsa. Never found it. Liked this though:

I doubt that there lives a man with soul so dead that he doesn’t pray for deliverance from anonymity.

And this:

What does happen to men who can find no other path for themselves than the one occupied by the juggernaut of an onrushing civilization?

Still puzzling over old Ike’s background, how exactly he was connected to the Trail of Tears, the mystery of his whiteness (or lack of it), which is curious in itself.  Curious too about the novel ending there, and the rather spectacular death-by-natural-cause of both Ike and Tepaha, the strange epilogue of sex and accommodation. Above all I’m curious (and angry, and saddened) about this strange cult of violence grown so deep and large that it blots all other human emotions out, all possibilities of cooperation, camaraderie, solidarity — forget about kindness or compassion. It’s so closely tied here  with the expansion of whites across a continent taking everything they could. Despite that underlying fact, it is more obviously associated with the Apaches and the suspect blood of the Kings, the ‘uncivilised’ nature of these savages with their childlike and violently innocent women and their opaque codes of honour. White people got a lot of mileage imposing their own crimes and deepest fears on the peoples they were doing their best to destroy. Tulsa was good at this on both fronts, as Thompson writes:

Tulsa knew just what to do about the Crazy Snake rebellion, the last of the Indian uprisings. She knew just what to do – and she did it – when race riots threatened to destroy the city. She… But that is getting ahead of the story.

So it’s not hard to believe that if there is a good man here it is the Marshal, attempting to impose the ‘honour of law’ on an unruly territory. Marshals and Sheriffs are always (almost always I guess, perhaps, exceptions might have existed) the bad guys in my book, they represent the violence of the state supporting genocide and one of the largest land grabs in known history. Telling that Thompson in the end, however obliquely, comes down on their side, even though he’s capable of recounting with some sorrow the injustice of the Trail of Tears.

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Books, Intersections, Reviews

Roediger on How Race Survived US History

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7986411This was quite a brilliant look at how and why the idea of race has developed in the United States. I haven’t read Roediger before so I can’t really compare it to his previous work, but given it’s written for a more popular audience, which I think is important, I did not mind the lack of footnotes. While it was reasonably short, I confess it took me a long time to get through and I’m not sure if that was because of the language or the weight of the ideas, but I didn’t regret a second.

It begins with a definition of race. For Roediger race is not a natural category, it is something new. It has been laboriously constructed to divide and sort people and thereby define how they relate to property, management, punishment and citizenship. The first of the two clearest examples of how this works is of course slavery, which took many different people of many different languages and cultures and defined them as black, as uncivilised and less than Europeans if not less than human, and only worthy of being slaves. The second is in the conquest and genocide of the Native Americans. Initially seen in the period of British rule as tribes with whom to ally with or fight against in the wars against other European powers, as a new nation began to create itself and push its boundaries they quickly became defined as red, as savages, as shiftless and lazy, and therefore worthy of being dispossessed of their lands. When they fought back? Jefferson himself argued shortly before his death that they be exterminated.

Through these stories we begin to come to grips with the two other key ideas about race contained in the book. The first is that of ‘whiteness as property’. Skin colour comes to define almost everything about an individual: where they live and work, what they can aspire to, the texture of their everyday life. When all else fails you can still cling to whiteness to put yourself above other people. You are a citizen. You cannot be enslaved. You are better than others. Your skin colour has a value, whiteness comes to be worth something in itself, something that distinguishes you and puts you above others. There was a time before this was true, when indentured servants and slaves escaped together, when the mixing of races was voluntary rather than from the rape of slaves. Laws made of whiteness something to be defended: banning interracial marriage, penalizing indentured servants who run in the company of a non-white, ruling that children share the freedom or the servitude of their mother, ruling people of color less than human and non-citizens. It was a combination of enticement and terror, whites either acted to their own benefit by buying into it or were punished severely for its transgression.

On the opposite side you found a law in Barbados from 1668: “An Act declaring the Negro-Slaves of this Island to be Real Estates.”

The second point is based on Stuart Hall (who I love). As Roediger says of him, he “acutely points out that racism emerges and is recreated from the imperatives of new sets of realities, not just from the bad habits of the past” [xiii]. The first key is that there are imperatives that drive this social construction of race, such as the desire for free labor to develop open land, the greed for land and expansion both in terms of speculation and profit, and to vent the building anger of the working white classes who are not finding in America their promised prosperity and demanding free land while threatening revolution. The second: that these imperatives do not just happen in some past time and continue on through inertia or habit (though the weight of the past cannot be treated lightly). The key is that racism still exists because new imperatives exist to ensure that it does. Until we understand them, we cannot end racism.

In a nutshell: “White supremacy persisted not only by working against the forces of freedom, of openness, and of economic rationality in US history, but also by working through them. Such complexities complicate the verb ‘survive’ in this book’s title, in that many of the forces pushing against the logic of racism at the same time validated, created, and recreated white supremacy.” [xv]

He goes on to explore and draw out these ideas through American history, looking at 4 key points where racism could have ceased, but didn’t. In very simplified terms:

How did it survive a revolution? Because honestly, it’s a bit ingenuous to revolt in the name of ideals of liberty and self-determination against British oppression while you yourself hold slaves. This is the classic ‘American dilemma’, which Roediger argues to be false. The revolution was funded by slavery, and Du Bois noted that the Constitution was in fact a huge blow to the slave liberation movement, Roediger sums it up succinctly: “[the constitution] made even indentured whites (their race unnamed) into “free persons”, it read Indians (who were named) out of citizenship, and it counted enslaved “other persons” (named neither racially nor in their servile position, by what one delegate called an “ashamed” constitutional convention) not as holders of political power, but as sources of such power for their own enslavers.” [51] Thus America becomes a white man’s country, welding together large and fractious class divisions through the imperative of expanding into Indian territory and maintaining race status.

How did it survive capitalism? Because even the Marxists argued that race would dissolve in the crucible of the working class. But in fact capital thrives on having different groups of workers in a hierarchy and in competition with each other, and it became policy to play these groups off one another. And slavery was not some pre-capitalist formation, it grew up with capitalism.

How did it survive jubilee and the abolition of slavery? That was the moment there was the most hope…but “Jubilee did not collapse under the weight of internal contradictions, but under extended assault.” The rise of the KKK, in one small town in Louisiana 60 republican party members were murdered during reconstruction. And then the fateful election where the Republicans gave up reconstruction all together and abandoned blacks to their fate for an uncontested election. Hayes almost certainly lost the popular vote, but he became president anyway.

How did it survive the immigration of those white Europeans most discriminated against? Through a process of coercion and aspiration and immense exploitation they slowly became accepted as white. In a sense they thus agreed to accept the rules of privilege rather than struggle against them.

And so it is still with us, Obama notwithstanding. The main point is “how unlikely it is that a force so longstanding, formative, and persistently recreated as white supremacy has been in United States history will be abolished by accident, as a result of the momentum of forces like capitalism or immigration that themselves have no anti-racist agenda.” [xv] We have to actively fight it, and to do so we have to understand it. This book takes us a great deal of the way I think. It is very US specific, while the drama of race has played out globally (as has the US role) and yet none of that is connected here which I found an absence. But this is an important book.