Trace. Lauret Savoy
African Americans once lived in “Indian Territory.” They’d been brought by members of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole nations forced across the Mississippi River in the southeastern removals of the 1830s and 1840s. Although only an elite few of the “five civilized tribes” held human beings as property, more than seven thousand people with African blood lived in bondage in Indian Territory on the eve of the Civil War. But bondage took different forms, from the rigid “slave codes” of the Cherokee Nation to more fluid social relations in Seminole society.
Autonomous communities of Seminole “slaves” formed the earliest Black towns here. Freed people established more settlements after the war. Then came the 1889 and 1890s land runs. Thousands of African American homesteaders were among those who settled “unassigned” or “surplus” lands—what hadn’t been reserved for other removed tribal peoples including Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Apache. Many settlers came from the Deep South searching for what one Black territorial newspaper called “the last chance for a free home.” By 1910 at least thirty all-Black towns had formed in what was now the new state of Oklahoma, most striving to become independent, farm-supported communities. Those now abandoned—like North Fork Colored, Cimarron City, Liberty, or Wybark—rival in number those surviving—like Summit, Tullahassee, Boley, and Langston City.
I had no idea where my mother’s family fit in, if at all.
ROLLING AND GULLIED red plains lie south of the Cimarron River in north-central Oklahoma. Langston City began there in 1890 on unassigned lands opened in the 1889 run. Its population once exceeded three thousand—before the state highway was rerouted.
I spent a day gathering what information I could in the Black Heritage Center archives of Langston University, formerly the Colored Agricultural and Normal University of Oklahoma. Through the 1890s and early 1900s, Langston City’s founder, Edwin P. McCabe, and other leaders promoted a “Negro” Oklahoma. They advertised existing towns and recruited immigrants for new town colonies and homesteads. “Langston City restores to the Negro his right and privileges as an American citizen and offers protection to themselves, families, and home,” wrote McCabe, also editor of The Langston City Herald. “Langston City is the Negro’s refuge from lynching, burning at the stake and other lawlessness and turns the Negro’s sorrow into happiness.”
The hope that Oklahoma might be admitted to the Union as an African American–controlled state was far from fancy for thousands of Black homesteaders. But the promise of self-governing havens would be dashed. Owners of small farms had little margin against drought or repeated crop failures. Few could afford the turn to mechanized farming. And when Indian and Oklahoma territories became the state of Oklahoma in 1907, the legislature disenfranchised African American residents and segregated public facilities.
OKFUSKEE COUNTY. ALTHOUGH it appeared that I-40 had sucked the life from Highway 62 in rural east-central Oklahoma, the road sign was enough to draw me in:
WELCOME TO BOLEY
LARGEST AFRICAN AMERICAN TOWN
FOUNDED 1903
BOLEY RODEO MEMORIAL WEEKEND
The historical marker clinched it: BOLEY, CREEK NATION, I.T., ESTABLISHED AS AN ALL BLACK TOWN ON LAND OF CREEK INDIAN FREEDWOMAN ABIGAIL BARNETT . . .
The wide main street was empty of cars, the stone-and-brick buildings lining it more boarded up than not. I almost didn’t stop. But at Boley’s Community Center I met Mrs. M. Joan Matthews, mayor, and her sister Mrs. Henrietta Hicks. They gave me a tour of the town “museum,” an old house opened on request.
From these generous women and other residents, I learned that Boley began as a rural community of Creek freed people following the Civil War. Formally established as a town after the turn of the twentieth century, it quickly became “a going concern,” with more than four thousand residents.
Like The Langston City Herald, The Boley Progress found its way throughout the South, promoting the town as a refuge. “Have you experienced freedom?” began one early article. “What are you waiting for? If we do not look out for our own welfare, who is going to do it for us? Are you always going to depend upon the white race to control your affairs for you?” ran another.
By 1912 Boley boasted two banks, five grocery stores, five hotels, seven restaurants, three or four cotton gins, three drugstores, one jewelry store, four department stores, two livery stables, two insurance agencies, two photographic studios, two colleges, plus a lumberyard, ice plant, electrical generating plant, funeral home, newspaper, post office, and railroad depot. Its Masonic temple was the tallest building around for some time. Visiting a few years earlier, Booker T. Washington had praised Boley as the “most enterprising, and in many ways the most interesting of the Negro towns in the United States.”
Now the population hovers around a thousand. The main employers, I was told, are a nearby prison and the Smokaroma, on Bar-Bq Avenue. The town’s biggest event, the “oldest existing rodeo in an African American community.”
Everyone I met in Boley was warm and welcoming. Still I felt an unbridgeable distance. These people know. They were born here; they’ve lived here all their lives. They know their past. They know home. The names of the Creek freed people who founded the town didn’t include names I knew.
A century and more ago it was Come to Boley! Come to Cimarron City! Come to Liberty! Did ancestors come? I imagined some of my mother’s forebears relocating from Alabama’s water-thick air, plantation fields, and dark woods. I imagined their response to expanses of grass and sky, to the opening of distance to the eye, to a land on which they hoped to live on their own terms. I imagined the difference in felt attachment to place that one generation could make—one born in the antebellum South, another on the plains.
Had they wagoned in on a day like that of my visit, the sky an open vault, the air scented by the previous night’s rain and a thick June greening, they must have imagined possibility and then begun to live it. I’d like to say the old homestead lay upstream, that they called it haven, that maybe they raised broodmares and grew the best greens for miles. I’d like to believe imagination could be sparked by familial memory.
Or did any arrive in bondage decades earlier as slavery and enslaved were brought westward on trails of tears? Were any of them “Buffalo Soldiers” posted at Fort Sill or Fort Reno? Companies from the army’s then all-Black regiments served a century and more ago in Indian Territory.
I imagined but did not know.
Boley elders suggested looking for family names in the Dawes allotment rolls of the five nations. So east I drove to Okmulgee, capital of the Muskogee (Creek) Nation, by the Deep Fork of the Canadian River. The library and archives had lists segregating “by blood” tribal members from freedmen and freedwomen for all five nations. Although no Cades appeared on the rolls I saw, there were Turners, Reeves, and Allens. But were any of them my Turners, Reeves, or Allens? Without more than surnames, it was impossible to learn if any rolls listed my mother’s ancestors, by blood or not.
What I did learn was that the Cherokee Nation had revoked tribal citizenship of descendants of its freedmen and women. A knoll overlooking Tahlequah, capital of the nation, still goes by the name “Nigger Hill.”
• • •
Before leaving Oklahoma I returned to flowing water, crossing the Cimarron River—its ripples aglint and aglitter in slant waning light. Cimarron—wild, untamed—is a good name. Centuries earlier los cimarrónes had escaped Spanish slavery to live in seclusion on the isthmus of Central America.
Wading into the river’s insistent flow I could almost believe the impulse of life. At a confluence these waters merged with another channel’s flow, their sand and mud loads merging, too. Many rivers become one in Oklahoma, but not human beings or blood streams.
Bridging the distance between history and the particularities of family seemed an impossible task given the erosive and estranging power displacement could wield. Circumstances leaving no trace could outweigh any longing to remain in a homeplace.