[1 of 5] Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story, Prelude, 1, and 2 by LeAnne Howe
Author: LeAnne Howe
Howe, LeAnne. Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story. "Prelude, Chapters 1 & 2." Aunt Lute Books, 2007.
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Acknowledgments
There are many people to thank for their generous support in bringing Miko Kings to life. Barry Hannah, for bringing me to the University of Mississippi as the 2006-2007 John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence. The fellowship gave me the time to finish the book. Sincere thanks also goes to Professors Michelle Raheja, University of California, Riverside; Reed Browning, Kenyon College; Susan Strauss, Michigan State University; Philip Deloria, University of Michigan, for introducing me to His Last Game; Roy Wortman, Kenyon College; Annette Trefzer, University of Mississippi, and her husband Mickey Howley; Robert Warrior, University of Oklahoma, for passing along research from Carlisle Indian Industrial School; Jacki Rand, University of lowa, for her careful reading; Lauri Sisquoc, Museum Cura-tor, Sherman Indian School (Riverside, California); poet Susan Swartout for her encouragement all these years; Ron Pinkard, for our many intellectual discussions about Okchamali; and Amelia A. Rogers at the University of Mississippi, for her patience and help in creating the images. A special thanks to Alberta Blackburn, Billie Floyd, Brenda Tollett, Daisy Daggs, and Zelda Daggs for their expertise and knowledge on the history of Ada, Oklahoma. Thanks also to filmmaker Jim Fortier for helping me believe in images, and to Susan Power, who strongly urged me to follow the characters wherever they took me. Yakoke to all the Indian ballplayers and ball teams that play every August at the Choctaw Nation’s Red Warrior’s Park in Tuskahoma, Oklahoma.
Special thanks to Joan Pinkvoss for not giving up on me, or the novel. Gina Gemello, ditto, and to all the women at Aunt Lute Books. Many thanks to Deia de Brito for creating Ezol on the page, as well as to author and baseball historian Royce “Crash” Parr and his wife Sheila for their generous help with Oklahoma baseball history research.
And finally a very special thanks to my son Joseph Craig and his partner Sharon Moseley, who helped me create the baseball scenes in this story.
For all the American Indians who’ve played the game!
And here too is the echo of baseball’s childhood
memory in Anompa Sipokni, Old Talking Places.
Indian Territory.
A book.
The film.
The Story.
Prelude
A peach moon slowly rises at the hem of the sky. Here, September sunlight turns grainy at twilight, as the brilliant azure of the midday sky fades to robin’s-egg blue. In a half hour, balmy air will descend, signaling to the locust choir nestled on the limbs of a nearby oak tree that it’s time to travel again. Hunt a mate. Compete for love.
Meanwhile…
A few yards away at Eldo Whipple’s Chicken Farm outside of Ada, fourteen Indians dressed in a variety of stage costumes await another kind of signal. A cue from their moving picture producer Carl Laemmle. Four of the men wear short-sleeve shirts that say “Jimtown Bar.” The others have flimsy strips of cloth pinned on the front of their baseball shirts that read “Choctaw.”
Their long hair shorn and their faces scrubbed clean, the Choctaws wear clothes cut from modern textiles, the same as any Broadway clerk. They represent savagery gone civilized. Laemmle tells the Choctaws to “act jolly,” as if they were enjoying wearing long johns, socks, and tight shoes.
In real life the Indians are professional baseball players for the Miko Kings, winners of the 1907 Indian Territory League pennant. But today they’re acting in the first moving picture about American baseball. The story, set in Indian Territory, is about two rival teams, the fictional Jimtown Bar team and the Choctaw Indians. Everyone associated with the Miko Kings has been drafted to play a role in the film, which is called His Last Game.
The Miko Kings’ best hurler, twenty-five year old Hope Little Leader, has had a remarkable year, finishing the season with an earned run average of 2.17. Today, he’s made up to look like an aging, stoic plains warrior. He wears a black wig with two long braids, black shirt, a tan vest with blue horses painted on it, leggings, and moccasins. The wig’s supposed to make him look traditional, but Laemmle wove it like a girl’s braids. It’s obvious to the Indians that their producer doesn’t know the difference between the plaits of a powerful warrior and those of a little girl. Each time Laemmle’s back is turned, Hope’s teammates elbow one another and point at the wig. The men use sign language to call Hope Ohoyo Holba, like a woman but not.
Hope watches his teammates joke at his expense. He signs back that he’s the hero of this story: “Out of 157 games played this season, I’ve started in 45, completed 40, won 35, and lost 8.” He signs the number 8 again for emphasis.
The men snicker. Hope signals Blip Bleen, the Miko Kings’ playermanager. “Tell them I’m the hero,” he signs.
Blip takes one look at Hope and yells toward the other men, “Dang, if you ain’t the ugliest Indian gal I’ve ever seen!” A Chickasaw-Choctaw, Blip is also the batting champion for the Miko Kings. He’s hit .334 this season, earning him a fourth batting crown in the I.T. League. Today Blip dons a feathered headdress, leather-fringed war shirt, and leg-gings. His character represents another throwback to progress.
Hope walks over to Blip, who’s standing next to the “Jimtown Bar,” which in reality is the chicken coop on Whipple’s Farm.
“I’m supposed to restore the team’s confidence in the old ways,” Hope says. He pulls a piece of paper out of his back pocket and begins reading aloud. “It says right here: ‘Bill Going is the pitcher’s name. He’s the hero of the story and embodies the feral native in his natural habitat—undomesticated, untamed, and uncorrupted.
Blip grins. “You bet.” He strikes a match and lights the peace pipe that Laemmle has given him as a prop. “For an undomesticated feller, you read pretty good.” Blip slowly exhales smoke into the air. “Don’t worry,” he says, “in a hundred years no one will even remember our names.”
Hope kicks the dirt and walks away. He looks ridiculous, he just knows it. In fact, they all look preposterous. But no matter how much he protests, Laemmle just shakes his head and says, “A perfect foil. A perfect foil.” Hope has no idea what a “foil” is, but he wishes he’d never agreed to play it.
Making a moving picture is a new experience for the team. After finishing a 24-game winning streak that clinched the Indian Territory League pennant, the Miko Kings boarded the train to Chicago to play in a series of pick-up games.
They had one awful outing against Chicago’s Doc White, one of the American League’s best pitchers. But Hope found his arm in the bottom of the third and, with his own 1-2-3 chucks, dispensed Chicago’s three best hitters in twelve pitches, and Miko Kings finished second in the series.
Henri Day, Miko Kings’ owner, was shocked when the Chicago Tribune published a semi-fictitious story about the team that pitted “the red man against the white man.” The August 10, 1907 headline read, “Custer’s Last Stand, Strike Two.” At first Henri took offense because the reporter didn’t know the difference between the Choctaws, one of the Five Civilized Tribes from Indian Territory, and the Sioux of the Northern Plains.
“For Christ’s sake!” said Henri. “The Sioux do not have a professional baseball team. Not now, and at the rate white folks are trying to kill them, maybe never.”
But when Carl Laemmle arrived at their hotel the next morning, Henri (himself a Choctaw) learned the public relations value of being labeled a wild Sioux Indian. Laemmle said he owned a string of nickelodeons in Chicago and that he wanted to make a moving picture about real Indians.
“People want to see moving pictures that are realistic,” said Laemmle. “There’s heaps of money to be made from pictures about the noble red man.” The two men shook hands and agreed that if the Miko Kings appeared in the film, Laemmle would correctly identify the team as Choctaw.
Back on the moving picture set… Laemmle’s photographer barks orders at Hope from across Eldo Whipple’s chicken yard.
“Hey, yoose dere! In the black wig. Understand English?”
Hope nods to show that he does.
“Do not gaze directly into Lumiére!” The photographer points at his camera and repeats his warning again. Slowly.
Hope shouts, “Okay!” He straightens the wig on his head and watches as a young boy shoos an angry bantam rooster off the makeshift diamond. Until today the young immigrant was unloading railroad cars at the Frisco Depot. The boy speaks very little English. Everyone remarks on how lucky it is that Laemmle and the boy both speak Jewish.
A short distance away, Laemmle arranges the six extras dressed in black hats and black coats at the gravesite. What a bunch of cutups, thinks Hope. Three weeks ago, no one could have imagined that they’d all be in pictures. Even Henri’s oddball niece Ezol is playing a role, a male gravedigger. Laemmle told Ezol she had to keep the black hat pulled low to hide the fact that she’s a woman. Now her biggest challenge is being able to see to dig the grave.
Hope stands in the yard with his arms crossed, waiting with a kind of aloof detachment. He watches his teammates some fifty yards away clown and lark about. Occasionally their laughter rises on the wind and a word or two drifts in his direction. “Savage curveball” and “batting on third” are old stories, but “a one cut woman” is new. It vaguely interests him—until he feels something strike his big toe. He looks down and sighs. A little red hen is pecking his moccasins. He tenderly picks her up. “You don’t like being boxed in on allotment land, do you?” He holds her out in front of him and she clucks nervously, flapping out of his grasp. “Me neither,” he says, as chicken feet and feathers tumble downward.
A strong gust whips bits of sand in his face and he notices an eerie, bluish-green cloud moving up from the south.
Now even the chickens run for cover. Suddenly Hope is afraid. It’s true he wants to become famous as a great baseball pitcher, but not as some chucklehead in the nickelodeons. He decides to quit. Head for home. It’s bad luck playing make-believe. He strides to the gate and unties his mare. He grabs the reins and effortlessly jumps in the saddle just as Laemmle calls his name.
“Mr. Little Leader, we’re ready. Please take your place on the ballfield—without your baseball glove.”
Hope hesitates, weighing the situation, as Laemmle walks over to him. He dismounts and the two men confer out of earshot of the others. No one knows exactly what is said, but eventually Hope ties his horse back at the gate and joins the others. The producer flashes the signal. The camera begins rolling and Hope Little Leader winds up for the first pitch, caught between his dreams of grandeur and the dark stream on the horizon that awaits them all.
1
Restoration
Ada, Oklahoma, Summer 2006
As I stand in the middle of the living room in my house on Ninth Street, a carpenter swings a sledgehammer like a baseball bat into the lath and plaster wall.
Whack.
The lath caves in and bits of plaster fly across the room. He then leans the sledgehammer against a metal trash can and uses a claw hammer to jerk the small strips of wood outward. Weathered plaster, the color of dirty limestone, falls onto the floor. His helper comes into the room, picks up the sledgehammer, and begins to pound the wall again.
Whack. Whack. Whack.
In moments the room is filled with a chalky plaster dust. I walk outside and shake my protective mask. Even ten feet away I can hear chunks of plaster hitting the floor like rocks.
Whack.
Something about that sound…l close my eyes and am hurled back in time. Eight months ago: November 9, 2005.
Amman, Jordan. I’m running toward the sound of breaking glass. The ground shakes and I fall to my knees and cover my face. Flying glass cuts both arms, but I won’t notice the bloodstain on my white jacket until much later. Another explosion. I freeze. A large metal door rockets to the ground. I jump up and sprint toward the Days Inn. My friend’s in there…
“Lena?”
“Yes?” I open my eyes.
The carpenter is beside me, looking at me quizzically. “You okay?” I nod. “Come take a look at this,” he says. I put my mask on and follow him inside. He points to the breach he’s made, then reaches down and pulls out a dusty U.S. mail pouch that’s been hidden inside the wall. He knocks years of fine dust off the brown leather and hands it to me.
“This isn’t something you see every day,” he says. “Know how it got here?”
“No, I’m just as surprised as you.”
“See if there’s stolen money inside. Wouldn’t that be something!”
It takes a bit of doing, but finally I’m able to unfasten the brass buckle on the pouch. I leaf through the contents.
“Shoot,” I say. “Nothing but papers.” We joke about the famous bank robbers that came through Ada, then I put the pouch in the back bedroom and resume my work, sanding layers of colors off the kitchen cabinets. First blue, then green, and finally a colorless beige shows through as I push the electric sander against the doors. I force myself to ignore the sounds of the sledgehammer.
The land and the house once belonged to my Choctaw grandmother, Mourning Tree Bolin. I inherited it when she died nineteen years ago, and it has remained vacant until now. Although the roof is nearly caving in, it has solid oak flooring, a deep front porch with red brick pylons, and lovely wide eaves. When I first entered the front room after being away for so long, the majestic fireplace that once heated the house immediately captured my imagination. I could almost smell a fire blazing in the hearth, feel the heat of the crackling blackjack logs, hear the muffled voices of Indians gathered in the room. The image was so pleasing that my first remodeling decision was to have the ugly gas heater insert removed. It had been stuck in the hearth since the year I was born.
Later that evening, after the workmen leave, I gently wipe the pouch’s brown leather with a wet sponge and rub it with Lexol to soften it. At one time a leather shoulder strap must have been attached to each side, but it’s missing.
The pouch is stuffed with papers, some in a childish hand, others typed, some penned by an adult. There are handwritten pages of symbols and numbers, letters, newspaper clippings, and a 12 x 12 black and white photograph of an Indian baseball team. There is also a decaying journal with the name “Ezol” embossed on the cover. The spine is broken, its pages loose and catty-cornered every which way. It appears to me as if someone had hastily torn through the journal and ripped out pages, then retied the contents with a satin ribbon to hold it together. I don’t untie the ribbon for fear the pages will crumble in my hands.
The photograph has “1907 Miko Kings Champions” scrawled across the bottom. At the sight of the picture, I draw in a breath of satisfaction, a feeling so rare that I am taken aback. What a thrill to have known such men. Though thinking about who they were and what they were like is probably more satisfying than the reality, I know. When I was a child, my father was heroic to me only because I rarely saw him. He was a truck driver, a Sac and Fox from Stroud. I was often left for weeks at a time with friends or a maiden aunt of his. I can remember looking at his picture and counting the days until his return. But when he finally came home to pick up the dog and me, he was exhausted. All he did was sleep until he’d leave again.
Soon after the discovery, the contents of the leather pouch began to haunt me. I decided to ask my neighbor, Mr. Ellis, an elderly man in his eighties, if he’d ever heard of the Miko Kings. He said he hadn’t, but that in the early years of Ada—during his grandfather’s time—there were Indian baseball teams galore and that I should look through the local newspaper archives. Good advice, but it would have to wait. I was occupied with the ongoing construction. If I was going to make my living as a freelance journalist in the middle of Oklahoma, I needed a place where I could live and work.
But a couple of weeks later, I still couldn’t stop thinking about the mail pouch, especially the photo. Photography has always had the ability to record the visible world with a kind of notional truth. The faces of the Indian men in the picture are compelling, even handsome. Their expressions give no hint of the context of their lives. For instance, nothing in the image reveals the frustration, the anger they must have felt—they were living through the worst part of the Allotment Era. Initiated by the Dawes Act of 1887, the Allotment Era lasted for forty-seven years. During that time, the federal government privatized all of the tribal lands of Indian Territory into individual plots, much of it going to non-Indians. What I know about allotment is burned into me from my grandmother’s tirades. “Think of it, Lena!” she would hiss. “An entire race of people is swindled out of their land by changing the pronouns? Ours to mine. We to I.
Words are power. They change everything.”
Yet when I look at the photograph, I’m unable to read anger. Instead, I note the stormy clouds in the background that must have been moving across the prairie when the picture was taken. There is also a touch of naiveté in the nine dark Indians dressed in matching ball caps and uniforms. They look steadily into the camera’s eye. Their heads tilt forward ever so slightly as they lean on bats and clutch baseballs. Although the image is nearly a hundred years old, it isn’t an Edward Curtis-style photograph, with the Indians portrayed as either noble savages or stoic warriors. The men in my photo seem neither humble nor bloated with self-confidence.
Three of the Indians that stand in the back row wear suit coats and bowler hats. They don’t appear to be part of the team—who are they? Perhaps owners or investors, or maybe umpires. One of the players has a deep scar that runs from the top of his right eyebrow onto his cheekbone. His left hand is cupped around the knob of the bat. He’s locked in silence along with all the others, yet his eyes seemed to be looking directly at me. While I’d never had any interest in baseball, the player with the scar on his face captured my imagination. Who was he? And who did the pouch belong to? My grandmother? If not, who could have hidden it inside the wall of her house?
My grandmother had told me she’d built the house on her family’s allotment land in 1906, when she was only seventeen. This was a full year before statehood. Now when friends and neighbors come by, they remark on the bold sophistication that permeates the small Craftsman home. I’d always assumed that she’d used up all her elegance when she built the house—its understatement and design seemed so unlike her, the woman I often found sitting on the back porch in a bright pink dress, smoking one cigarette after another.
When MourningTree passed away in 1987, she was ninety-eight. She’d outlived her husband, Hank Bolin—and, much to her eternal sorrow, my mother, Kit Bolin Coulter, who died giving birth to me.
When I was a little girl, Grandmother did her best to gift me memories of my mother. She presented me with a satin-covered shoebox of keepsakes with “Lena Coulter” embroidered on the top. In it were Mother’s baby shoes. Her Gibson guitar picks. A lock of dark brown hair, a few pictures, a 1904 Indian-head penny, and sundry other items. In the pictures Mother looks tall and thin. Gorgeous even. For a time she’d been a successful country-western singer with a big alto voice, I’d been told. But Kit Bolin Coulter died of uremic poisoning a week after I was born. In 1959, there wasn’t much the doctors could do for the fifty-one-year-old Choctaw woman who was having her first baby. I’ve never been able to visualize my mother from the stories about her. I’d always pretend for Grandmother’s sake that I could find her in my box of memories. But she wasn’t there. I felt she’d abandoned me—that somehow my umbilical cord to the center of her had been severed, completely detached before I was born, setting me adrift to fend for my-self, with only an absent father.
I spent every summer with my grandmother in Ada, at her insistence. She would teach me Choctaw words, and how to pronounce them properly. I don’t think I retained all that much because we’d begin every lesson with the same words and expressions. She showed me how to pound corn with a pestle and fan the husks, the same way Choctaws have processed tanchi for a thousand years. We’d often make banaha, bean bread, and the Choctaw specialty, pashofa, a corn soup flavored with oak ash.
On Saturdays, we’d bake “washday cobbler,” a cross between pie and bread, made with blackberries, huckleberries, or peaches. At least once a week, we’d go fishing for sun perch at a small pond in nearby Byng. Often on these excursions she would dip her hands in pond water and pat me down from head to toe, all the while singing the “cool off song,” not a tuneful melody, but more of a chant. Grandmother said her song was to prevent a fire from growing in my belly. Sometimes she’d weep and say, “My girl, my girl. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. The fault is all mine.”
I didn’t need an explanation for why she cried. I knew it was because she resented me for being born. She just couldn’t get over the fact that I’d grown in her daughter’s body, and the shell of her gave way in order that I might live—nothing could change that between the two of us.
When I moved to New York in 1982, I believed I would never return to Oklahoma. At twenty-three, I wanted to forget that I was half Choctaw and half Sac and Fox. Forget all things Okie, like twangy country-western music. Pitchers of 3.2 beer. The po-lice. The way I looked—long black hair, brown eyes, and a sturdy build—I knew I could pass for Italian, Mexican, or French, especially in New York.
I landed a low-wage job with Condé Nast Publications. Although I was a glorified gofer, I learned enough to be hired as a real editorial assistant for Vanity Fair in 1983. As a beginning writer I was assigned to research, and had to contribute three short news stories per week to the various magazines owned by the corporation. Over the next nine years, I moved up through the publishing ranks and began writing short features for Condé Nast Traveler. But in 1994, I decided to quit. I was restless and wanted to see the world—a cliché, I knew, but it was true. I wanted to live out of the country. For a couple of years, I’d been off and on with a freelance photographer named Sayyed Farhan, a Palestinian who’d been making a successful living working abroad. Why not me? By then I had dozens of editorial contacts with magazines all over Europe. I’d read that after the first Gulf War, the Middle East was going to become the next travel frontier for Americans. King Hussein of Jordan had signed a historic peace treaty between his country and Israel, and American companies and NGOs were moving there in droves. I believed I could write and produce enough articles about traveling throughout the Middle East to support myself. So I relocated to Amman.
I began by writing about the sixth-century monastery of Saint Catherine in the Sinai Desert, the world’s oldest Souk in Damascus, the city of Palmyra, and the Nabataean trading center Petra in southern Jordan, where Cleopatra once caravanned to meet her lover, Mark Antony. I wrote about my personal encounters with Syrians, Egyptians, and Bedouin, and what it was like to be a tourist in the Holy Lands. My work then led me to the virtual world of online publications, increasing my income considerably.
I learned to speak Arabic like a foreigner. From my base in Amman, I traveled extensively, made friends, and rekindled my relationship with Sayyed. I had in mind to write a series of travel books about the new Middle East: “Tour Amman on $20 a Day,” that type of thing. The plan evaporated on September 11th with the bombing of the World Trade Center.
After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, I began to dress differently. I often wore all black and covered my hair with a white hijab. I tried to stand out in the crowd, though not as an American. I wanted to be mistaken for the American-educated daughter of a wealthy Jordanian, which would protect me somewhat from the Iraqi shebab—single men under thirty pouring into Amman since the invasion. I repeatedly said, “Aboui Arabi.” My father’s an Arab.
As my freelance work dwindled to nothing, I began working as an office temp for UNICEF and other NGOs. Then last November, in 2005, my life in Amman unraveled. As had been our custom when he came to town, I’d taken a taxi to meet Sayyed at the Days Inn. Often we’d spend afternoons in the lounge reading the Guardian or the New York Times, snacking on the mubassal, onion pancakes, and drinking shai, a sweet Arabic tea laced with fresh mint. But on that day, he’d been hired to take pictures of the hotel for their website. The taxi driver dropped me off a few blocks away so I could buy us a sweet. Then the explosions and, later, the news that the death toll was sixty people—including Sayyed.
During the next couple of months, I would sit on my apartment’s balcony and—according to strict Islamic doctrine— sin. But because I am neither Muslim nor Christian, I drank gin and tonics morning, noon, and night. I brooded. Even my friends’ pity annoyed me. I’d grown weary of being an expatriate, of always being called on to explain or defend America’s actions. Besides, I had my own problems with America, especially its treatment of American Indians. I regularly questioned who I was—an Indian from Oklahoma, always from, but forever absent? Of course, I’d returned home for cursory visits. There was my father’s funeral in Stroud in 1995, and a friend’s wedding. But without meaning to I’d become a nomad, searching the world for something I couldn’t quite name.
Then, in early April, I heard a strange voice at dusk during the Salaat. In Arab countries the Salaat is chanted five times a day, the last at sunset. That evening, a light breeze tickled the sands of the Arabian Desert, and through a veil of sunlight the whole of Amman seemed covered in a glittering fairy dust. But instead of “Allahu Akbar” I heard “The time has come to return home.” The next morning at sunrise it was the same. The time has come to return home. Without warning, I began to sob. So I hadn’t purged all my Native connections after all. Even though I’d put ten thousand miles between me and Oklahoma, the land of my ancestors had tracked me down and was speaking. At age forty-seven, I clung to it like a lamp against the darkness. I sold everything I had. Within a month I extricated myself from where I had thought I might be for the rest of my life.
A few weeks after the construction on the house was complete, I began in earnest to discover what had happened to the Miko Kings. On the back of the photograph was “September 1907” and a list of names. The handwriting was very small and the names of the players were block printed. Did my grandmother write this? Did she know the Indian baseball players? She must have. But why had she never mentioned them? Or even that she’d known Indians who were baseball players?
\didn’t know anything about Indian baseball teams around Ada, but my experience as a journalist and researcher taught me that I should be able to find the answers. I started with a visit to the Oklahoma Historical Society’s archives in Oklahoma City to see if any documents on Indian baseball teams existed. Nothing. Following up on Mr. Ellis’ advice, I read hundreds of pages of old newspapers from local towns around Ada on microfiche, looking for stories about the individual players. Another dead end. I asked around Ada if anyone could remember where the old ballpark had been.
Most folks didn’t even know that Ada had a ballpark in 1907. However, a woman at the Ada Historical Society found some of the players listed in the 1900 census records of Pontotoc County. When that was all the information she was able to recover, she suggested I go back through the mail pouch to see if I could find any other clues.
When I removed all the documents again, I found a small piece of paper stuck to the bottom of the bag. At first I was afraid I’d tear it when pulling it loose. But I carefully picked it out—a yellow, stiffened newspaper clipping.
I returned in earnest to the microfiche and began reading through hundreds of pages of newspaper. Day after day I read reel after reel. Eventually I realized there weren’t any personal accounts of the players because at the turn of the century there were no sportswriters in Indian Territory. There were reporters, but they were writing about shootings, stabbings, hangings, major fires, and obituaries. I did manage to find a couple of notices about the games, but no individual stories. No one was recording the players’ family lives, or writing about the team’s rivalries. Finally, dis-heartened, I gave up.
It was then that Ezol appeared. Perhaps my need to know brought her across time and space. Her spirit entered the house and placed the team’s history on my shoulders, heavy as foreign epaulets.
That night, she unwrapped the team’s stories as one might open birthday gifts. Out of order, but with a passion for celebration. Out came memories of glorious summer days and baseball diamonds blistered by blue skies and hot winds. Out came Ada’s storefronts and boardwalks. Eye-catchers and newspapers. Fireflies and fastballs.
She sprinkled her baseball stories with words like “up-down,” “inshoot,” and other terms I was unfamiliar with. She also talked about a silent film entitled His Last Game, and its producer, Carl Laemmle. She said the film depicted a Choctaw baseball pitcher, set amidst a murder plot. Yet the biggest problem Laemmle had was keeping a banty rooster off the makeshift ballfield. She told me she had been an extra in the film.
When at last she finally placed her delicate hands over the black and white image, she murmured softly, “This is the only photograph that exists of the Miko Kings. It was taken at the Ada ballpark just before they played Fort Sill’s Seventh Cavalrymen for the Twin Territories championship. The year is 1907. Here is what you see.”
Catcher Albert Goingsnake snatches up a ground ball and shoots it to Isom Joel at second, who pivots and fires to Lucius Mummy on first. Everyone watching the team warm up knows they’re about to witness the greatest Indian ball club ever assembled, because once the season ends, the future of the Twin Territories League is uncertain. On November 16, 1907, in less than two months, Indian Territory is being legislated out of existence, along with Oklahoma Territory. A state is being sewn together from two parts. With the creation of Oklahoma, with the privatization of tribal lands, everything changes. Indians will be written out of Oklahoma’s picture. And history.
But Hope Little Leader doesn’t care about this. His only thoughts are about pitching a no-hitter against the Seventh Cavalrymen. Before going out to the mound to start batting practice, he pulls a pockmarked bat out of a potato sack and hands it to Blip Bleen, playermanager for the Miko Kings. Bleen, the most powerful hitter in the Indian Territory League, has already socked an incredible twentyseven home runs during an eighty-nine game stretch. An unheard of number considering it’s the era of the dead-ball.
Goingsnake holds his catcher’s mitt, a homemade leather pancake permanently dented from years of abuse. He stands next to Blip. “Don’t need a catcher,” says Blip. “My bat splits tornados.”
Goingsnake spits tobacco juice on the ground. “Okay,” he says casually, “but Hope don’t throw no tornados.”
“He will today,” says Blip, practicing his swing. “We’re playing against soldiers.”
Hope doesn’t react or abandon his spittle-lubed snarl, not even for Blip. Not today. Rather, he strides out to the mound with five baseballs in the crook of his left arm. He sets them on the red dirt. Taking the first ball in his right hand, he winds up and fires toward home.
Blip belts it into left field, where centerfielder Nolan Berryhill scrambles after it.
The next pitch is high. Blip fouls it.
Hope winds up again, this time throwing a fastball with a twister’s tail that reverses itself as it drops in. Most batters don’t even see a seam. But instead of aiming for the ball, Blip calls it to his bat and slams it into tomorrow. Later, when a spectator asks him what happened to the ball, Blip will say he knocked it into the future.
After talking with Ezol that first night, after considering her details—some more lucid than others—I searched the web and found that Carl Laemmle’s International Moving Pictures had made what is considered the first film drama about American baseball. I ordered a copy of the film from the Library of Congress. I’d made a career of being able to verify facts. Ezol’s stories should be no different. I also needed to prove, at least to myself, that I wasn’t suffering from some kind of mental breakdown.
When the film arrived from Washington, D.C., I was stunned. There she was in the final scene, crudely made up to look like a man, playing one of the gravediggers. I knew then that she, a Choctaw woman from the past, a spirit, had told the truth about her experiences and the lives of the Indian baseball players she’d known in Ada. Her information had been correct and, most important to me, verifiable. When she reappeared a couple of weeks later, I was ready. I knew we were going to write the story of the Miko Kings together. She would talk and I’d write. Eventually I realized that I wasn’t writing, but merely taking dictation from a woman who wasn’t. well, she wasn’t present tense.
Was she a dream? Perhaps. But she was more than that.
A lost soul? Definitely not lost. She chose to be here with me. And yet I’ve come to understand that if she isn’t present, if I don’t stay cloistered with her, the story of Indian Territory baseball and the men who played the game may never be told. So I listen, caught up in a virtual world of her making. We talk of the teams’ great victories, their tragic losses and, of course, her philosophy of time.
She is the narrator; I the medium, intermediary, stenographer, and servant to the story. My work as a translator feeds this apparition in my house. To be any good at translation, you have to do a kind of disappearing act. Teach yourself to become invisible by breathing life onto the page, and then exist there, side by side with the words and images. At least for a time.
What became of the Miko Kings—what happened to Ezol Day and the untimely events that brought her to me—are things I could never have imagined or written on my own. Simply put, the voice speaking is my voice, but the voice of this story is hers.
Here is another echo of baseball’s childhood
memory in Anompa Sipokni, Old Talking Places.
After the bases are gone
After we’ve all come home
Nothing but red dirt in my skivvies
My back and ribs is sore
May I never go back
for another crack at the bat, Honey
until the bases are loaded once more.
2
Indian Territory, As Told by Ezol Day,
Postal Clerk and Experimenter of Time
Ada, Oklahoma, August 1, 2006
At two a.m., the sky is exceedingly bright as bodies of stars sashay across the heavens. I awaken to my alarm with great anticipation, believing tonight’s encounter with Ezol Day will reveal another important clue as to what happened to the Miko Kings and why their story is erased from the historic record. Or at the very least, missing.
I make myself a cup of coffee. Because Ada is a small sleepy town in south central Oklahoma, there is very little light pollution. The early morning air, with little humidity, is completely still. I open the white French doors of my office and slide the screen shut to keep out mosquitoes. For the past six nights we’ve been working until dawn. I find it hard to stay awake, so I’ve been making myself go to bed long before dark and wake up early to prepare for her arrival. Because we rarely meet in the other rooms of the house, I’ve already positioned myself in front of my computer.
And then she appears.
When she first arrives, she recognizes nothing. Her routine is this. She walks across the room and examines all the family pictures hanging on the wall in my office. Her routine behavior makes me realize how I’ve burdened this room with the past. She stares at each image for a moment, then asks about only one. I tell her the little girl with her arms around the dog is a photograph of my mother, Kit. It has been the same each night. At first, it puzzled me, but I’ve come to believe that Ezol undergoes a kind of re-entry reunion with the future each time she appears. My office is in the new addition of the house and would not have been there when she was alive. I tell myself this accounts for her strange behavior. Whatever the case, Ezol always shrugs and takes a seat in a nineteenth-century leather wingback chair that I’ve strategically placed in front of my computer desk. The chair belonged to MourningTree. When I returned from Amman it was the first piece of furniture I had reupholstered, in bordello red, a “period” color from the nineteenth century. I believe the chair helps Ezol settle in.
In the dim light of my office, Ezol’s radiant dark brown skin is exactly the same color as her hair. She piles it high into a chignon. Very fashionable at the turn of the nineteenth century. She wears a white linen blouse and a black skirt cinched at the waist with a narrow belt. The sameness of her hair, skin, and eyes makes her appear like one of the photographs hanging on the wall.
“I’ve been thinking,” she says, “this must have been Uncle Henri and Cousin Cora’s house. They lived in a house just like this one on West Ninth Street.”
“No,” I answer. “The land belonged to MourningTree Bolin, my grandmother, and she built the house. This was her allotment, I have the papers to prove it. They’re in the safety deposit box in my bank.”
Ezol smoothes the hem of her dress. “Documents lie,” she says casually. “The Bolins were Choctaws from Tish and they never relocated to Ada.”
“Tish” is the way locals refer to Tishomingo, a Chickasaw town thirty miles from Ada. But I know my grandmother’s family history and on this point I will not defer, even to a ghost.
“We’re not related to the Bolins from Tish. We’re the Bolins from Fittstown. Hank Bolin was my grandfather. This house was built on MourningTree’s land. Back then, Choctaws didn’t always have last names. Grandmother told me this herself. When she married my grandfather, she became MourningTree Bolin. No one else has ever lived in this house or on her land.”
Ezol studies me. Her eyes are kind. I like it that she looks directly into my eyes when she wants to make a point. In some ways I think she resembles my grandmother, however, I have to remind myself that loneliness may be coloring my judgment. I’ve come home but my loved ones are all dead, so whatever resemblance I see in Ezol is just plain longing.
“In 1904,” says Ezol, “75,000 white people in Indian Territory applied to the U.S. Dawes Commission for a place on the rolls of the Choctaw and the Chickasaw Nations. Everyone knew if they were accepted on the Dawes Rolls they’d receive a section, or two, of the tribes’ allotment lands. Free for the taking. The Dawes Commission admitted them all, but the Cherokees and Choctaws contested the inflated numbers and appealed to the government for a review.
It’s still pending.”
“What is?”
overinent ocuments cannot e rusted who they really are if they rely on paper identities isued by the federal
“What about the documents in the mail pouch?” I ask.
Silence.
Ezol looks away, lost in the memories of her time. At least that’s how she appears to me. After a long while she picks up the pages I’ve typed and begins reading aloud:
“Meanwhile in Ada, a Choctaw woman rails against the epidemic of forgers, fraudsters, grafters, and thieves. Finally, she gives birth to a baby with four fully formed front teeth. An editorial in the Ada Weekly News suggests that she give her newborn a rifle. Nothing, says the editor, will stop the Indians from being swindled out of their land, or disappearing from the face of the earth. Except a war.” She pauses.
“Where did you find this editorial?” Ezol asks, holding the pages in her hand like a writ.
“From a newspaper clipping in the mail pouch. It’s from 1904.”
Ezol sits erect as a judge and continues reading aloud from the first chapter of our book.
Nobody said it was pretty here, but it’s demanding. Like a beehive—full of activity. The photograph of the Miko Kings fits in nicely next to the pictures of Ada’s four hotels, three banks, four cotton gins, fire depot, glass plant, and flour-mill huffing powdery wheat dust and emphysema into the air.
Of course, peculiar rules begin to emerge in Ada, the town whose trajectory is on a collision course with fancy. The most widely criticized ordinance says no female under eighteen can be hypnotized, and no male under twenty-one can be hypnotized without the consent of a parent or guardian.
In 1904, Choctaw entrepreneur Henri Day begins building a baseball park in Ada, and a baseball team called the Miko Kings. He aiso has plans for an all indian-owned baseball league.
A skunk farm is also established near Ada that same year. E.P. Dowd, a wealthy New York furrier, wants to breed “champagne blondes” and bets that their fur will be as valuable as mink in the coming decade. Dowd puts his money where his ideas are. His headquarters are in Civets (named for the French civette, or skunk), a town northeast of Pauls Valley. The following week, a local trapper named Sam Lewis, who’s never worn anything but a cowhide jacket, mulls over the notion of wearing skunk. “I’m willing to give it a try,” he tells Charlie Catcher, the reporter for the Ada Weekly News.
Lewis has been hired as foreman to oversee operations at Dowd’s Skunk Farm. He assures Adans that the twenty-acre farm (as it’s called) will be enclosed with a cement wall, making it thoroughly escape-proof.
“You gotta get them little stinkers cut off by the fourth week, or else. My helper at the farm, an Indian kid named Hope Little Leader, is learning the hard way,” laughs Lewis. “Just last week we soaked him in a tub of tomato juice to get the stench off, but little good it did him. Skunk wrangling takes time. We’re gonna give him another go at it.”
Just about every adult has survived a spell of typhoid fever. If a yellow flag flies outside a house, it means the family has contracted smallpox. Dozens die in December 1904, but Ada birthrates continue to soar.
Still others die as criminals. Take the recent newspaper story, “The Gunslingers from Vici Came, Saw, Were Conquered in Ada!” Jim Harris, Willie Bailey, and Jeff Woodall, all from Vici in northwestern Dewey County (named for the Latin veni, vidi, vici), got into a brawl over a floozy at Pud Kyser’s joint on Broadway last Friday. Two were shot dead.
Woodall’s throat was cut almost from ear to ear. The newspaper reports that Woodall is probably mortally wounded.
The following week, Deputy Marshal Bob Nester makes a daylight raid to halt criminal activity at Kyser’s. As he goes in the front door, three gamblers jump out the second story window. Nester, somewhat chagrined at their daring get-away, fires a few intimidating shots as he shouts, “If you rabble-rousers ever run from me again, I’ll shoot to kill!”
Unfortunately, as the town grows so does corruption. A federal judge in Ardmore gets wind of the sleaze in Ada and issues twenty-one warrants against the town’s most prominent citizens, alleging that they’re selling land belonging to the Chickasaw Nation. (Issuing fraudulent deeds is not a new practice in Indian Territory.) The judge sends newly appointed U.S. Marshal Basil Bennett to Ada with the warrants. However, just as soon as Bennett arrives in town, the warrants mysteriously disappear. Within a month, Bennett is elected Ada’s town marshal. Commerce continues unabated.
Every Tuesday at noon, members of the Commercial Club gather at the Harris Hotel to hear a lecture on morality, temperance, or both. But Thursday afternoon, most of the male members of the club gallop their horses out of Ada and ride hard for thirteen miles into Pottawatomie Country. They pass dozens of blackjack trees, green crater-shaped hills, and old Pottawatomie ladies napping in front of dilapidated shacks, their blue and red blankets wrapped loosely around them. But the men are blind to their surroundings. They’re lost in the details of turning straw into gold. Gambling fever will do that to men on a quest. The riders slow down at the muddy South Canadian River and cautiously mosey around the drifting quicksand cavities, then pick up the pace at a tree stump sign on the north side of the river that reads “Corner Saloon Open. Two Miles.”
Tom Bobbitt, the Corner Saloon’s most recent co-owner, is a belching, wind-passing box of a man. He goes out of his way to disavow the other Bobbitts in Ada, calling them ramrodding Biblists. When Bobbitt moved up from Texas to go into business with the Corner Saloon’s owner, Bill Connors, gamblers from as far away as St. Louis celebrated.
For Bobbitt, betting on Indians is like betting on horses. “They’re both commodities,” he says to Charlie Catcher, who later quotes him in the newspaper. Bobbitt and the other gamblers guzzle whiskey, banter back and forth over the teams, and relive each inning they’ve bet on.
By 1905, the counter behind the bar is crammed with jars full of clippings about National and American League teams collected from newspapers as far away as Ohio’s Cleveland Plain Dealer. Saloon patrons bring the clippings to Bobbitt so he can maintain accurate records. On Fridays Bobbitt posts league standings, the starting lineups, statis-tics, and the odds on a large blackboard behind the counter. His betting list includes “Southpaws,” “Three-fingered players,” “Weaklings,” and “Sackers.”
Other incidentals for sale at the Corner Saloon are not mentioned in polite company. Such as women and little boys.
Then there’s Dr. Price’s Special Wheat Cure for Gonorrhea, and potency powders like Spanish Fly and Elk Horn Crush.
So far, the Chinese railroad workers are the only ones buying the Elk Horn Crush that promises in tiny but legible print “to create a mighty force in men.”
The Corner Saloon’s policy is completely democratic about who can purchase shots of whiskey, remedies for fornica-tors, or time with the half-naked prostitutes living around back. Tom Bobbitt says he doesn’t care who does what to whom as long as they all pay him a share of the arrangements. For anyone who misunderstands the policy, Bobbitt wears a thirty-three-inch-long Light Cavalry saber sheathed on his belt, and a Colt Six-Shooter is strapped on his right leg. He is rumored to have stabbed as many as four men in one night when they had forgotten the rules.
“I only kill to protect the safety of our patrons,” says Bobbitt. “That’s the secret of our success.”
Over the next two years, money pours into Ada. The city’s motto becomes “Nothing is too big or too good for Ada.” Miko Kings’ popularity seems to know no boundaries. Even the Katy Restaurant, next to the train depot, stays open twenty-four hours, seven days a week, to serve the throngs of fans who come to watch the Indian baseball games.
But change does finally come to Indian Territory. The land shudders at the thought. When time slips out of its boundaries, everything falls every which way. Wild horses leap into the air and whinny. Panthers cry like babies in the streets, along with the sorry gamblers and drunkards who imagine games that never were. Although no one now can clearly recall the Miko Kings, it is here where the image, the reflection, the photograph of the greatest Indian baseball team still exists.
Now time opens like a coffin.
At last Ezol Day stops reading. “The story is not exactly right, but it’s not wrong either,” she says. “How did you find out about the Corner Saloon?”
“The records at the Oklahoma Historical Society,” I say. “It must have been infamous, because it was repeatedly mentioned as a headquarters for gamblers, prostitutes, and their friends. I read that Bobbitt and Connors supposedly paid the local sheriffs hush money when they had to ‘shoot at’ a patron, which was apparently code for killing someone.”
Ezol nods and reflects on what I’ve said.
“I didn’t know about the uses for elk horn, but men always rode out there to place their bets on the baseball games.
That much was common knowledge. Bobbitt claimed that he was the best thing that ever happened to the Miko Kings. He once told Uncle Henri that without the gamblers, Miko Kings’ ballpark would go under.”
“Was he right?”
She stares past me and doesn’t answer. Her eyes seem to be directed outwards, locked toward some distant memory.
“How did you know Hope was once a skunk farmer?” she asks.
“I found the abstract and title for Dowd’s Skunk Farm among some papers at the historical society. Hope Little Leader was listed as one of the farm hands.”
At that moment we hear a fire truck race down the street. Ezol goes to the window and for a long while she observes the darkness in silence. Finally she says, “The circus lion is burned up in his cage. A black bear named Bobby suffocates from the smoke. Blinded first, he feels the fire singe the rest of him. Only the peacocks survive. But there was something about the way the people came the very next day—all dressed up in their finest clothes. Even Cora came to help clean up the debris and carry off the dead.”
Ezol turns around and smiles regretfully. “Choctaws and Chickasaws are renowned for their ability to rebuild. It was their reaction to the fire that helped me understand that there is honor in all things. We seemed to manifest nature itself, as re-creators,” she says softly. “Chaos and destruction serve a purpose, you know.”
I nod absentmindedly. I’ve learned to keep a running list of things to research, so I keep a yellow notepad next to my computer. I write, “Circus fire in Ada—what year?”
Ezol walks again over to my wall of photographs and straightens the picture of my mother.
“That’s Kit,” I say hesitantly, “my mother. She died a week after I was born.”
“Kit,” she says, touching the frame again. “I like her name. She looks like a friend of mine.”
I don’t know what to say, so I smile weakly. “In a way, the whole of Indian Territory was made up of imposters,” says Ezol. “The difficulty for self-invented people is that they must always reconcile what they were back then with who they are now. Bo Hash and Justina Maurepas were imposters. They invented themselves again and again, especially Justina. Their behaviors wreaked havoc with their loved ones, but Justina was my dear friend. She understood me, and she never laughed at my equations and my notions about time. I will always honor her for that.”
“Who were they?” I ask. “You’ve never mentioned Bo and Justina before.”
“Two more people important to the story I am telling.”
Another present-day sound interrupts us. This time a garbage truck has pulled up in the alley behind my house.
Although it’s still dark, dawn is approaching. Ezol goes to investigate and stands at the French doors that open onto the backyard. I’m interested to find out what modern sounds can mean to someone from the past. She watches from the doorway while a sanitation worker tosses glass bottles into a bin of his truck. I note that she’s curious about all things unfamiliar. She lingers a moment longer at the back door, then returns.
“Interesting,” she says, finally.
“What is?” I ask.
“The workman outside.”
“We recycle now,” I say.
“We did too,” she says. “Back then, they were called scavengers.”
I assume she means that Indians left their refuse for the buzzards, or other carrion-feeders, but I add “scavenger” to my list of things to research.
“Ada is an event in which I isolate myself now and again,” she says. “The circus that came to town, the moving picture producer, the fire, the ballgames—they all happened here. But then, everything, even the farthest universe, has already happened. They’re stories that travel now as captured light in someone else’s telescope. No?”
Ezol reaches for the crystal pitcher of water on a small table next to her. She pours water into one of the glasses but, as usual, never touches it. I’ve come to realize she likes to fill the goblet with water, underscoring a vital truth. Water is life.
I pause and think for a moment. I want to say that I lived in an area of the world where water is a precious gift. I once walked fifteen miles in the baking heat of the Nabataean desert with a group of Bedouin women. The women never took a drink of water until after dusk, when the sheep were bedded down for the night. I also think of explaining that my stories now appear in the virtual world of online magazines. The captured light of a computer screen. But since those are not the discussions she’s interested in, I shrug.
“There are some hundred thousand million galaxies in our known universe,” I say. “I’ve read that superstring theorists believe there are ten dimensions in spacetime, and that humans only see a meager slice of reality.”
She frowns.
I dig deeper, trying to recall what, if anything, my grandmother told me about Choctaw medicine. Not much, I’m afraid. Of course medicine people have always told stories about their vision quests and journeys to other dimen-sions. Most white people, academics, Christians, even some Indians, dismiss these stories as “myths.” But I’m talking to someone who existed—or exists—in another dimension, and I’m intimidated by my own ignorance. I say I don’t know.
“We will come back to that,” she says. “I am speaking now about Ada, the boomtown. The railroads have brought in so many newcomers, we don’t know where they are going to live.”
“Who?” I ask.
“Adans. Indians. People,” says Ezol.
“But that time has passed,” I say. “Most of Ada’s merchants went bankrupt a long time ago. Pushed out of business by progress. Large multinational corporations like Wal-Mart and…”
Ezol takes a deep breath, and I realize that she is dictating again. I place my fingers on the keyboard.
“Ready,” I say, as I type.
“Adans were intent on keeping the streets clean. The cafés in Ada, and the hotels, were open day and night,” she says curtly, pausing to press her fingertips on her forehead.
“Verb tenses,” she says impatiently. “I was right about analyzing language as the way into my theorem of time. The laws of physics do not distinguish between past and present. Neither does the Choctaw language, at least not in the way that English does. Choctaw verbs have a much broader application, which shades the meaning in ways that English verbs cannot. Take for instance the word chifitokchaya.”
“I don’t know what it means.”
“Run and live,” she says.
“That’s a hard one to imagine,” I say.
“Not if you’re a batter on third,” says Ezol. “Now what do you see when I say chifitokchaya?”
“A baseball player running for home plate!” I say, excited.
She smiles. “Choctaw words are tools. They form equations, much the same as geometry,” she says confidently. “Ge-ometry may be guided by facts, but those facts are ultimately the choice, or consent, of a specific group. Language, rules of grammar, and meaning are the agreement of a particular group based on their practiced experience. I theorized that Choctaws didn’t have the same experiences with time as those of Europeans because we speak differently.
This is revealed in our vast differences in verb usage. What the Choctaws spoke of, they saw. Experienced.” I stop typing for a moment and study her mannerisms. The delicate customs she keeps for herself. I think she’s decidedly patrician for a Choctaw who first came to Ada in 1900 from the Good Land Indian Orphanage. What I have been able to piece together about her life comes from a Christmas letter in the mail pouch from a minister at Good Land. She was the niece of Henri Day, born in Doaksville in 1879 to Ellen Day, Henri’s sister. Ezol remained at Good Land until she was twenty-one. I think it’s strange that she didn’t come to live with her uncle and cousin until she was grown.
In 1905 Ezol Day wrote an article entitled “Moving Bodies in Choctaw Space,” in which she argued that two systems of thought, Choctaw and English, are in conflict over “time.” She posited that universal time in space could not exist because there are no universal verb tenses. She based her hypothesis on language theory, and concluded that time must flow at different rates for English speakers and for tribal peoples. Her paper is elegantly reasoned, addressing fundamental questions around Choctaw expressions of space and time. She was writing at the same time as Albert Einstein, but probing the dimension of cultures, as well as of time and space. I wonder how she was able to do it with only a boarding school education.
“Are you tired?” she asks, pointing to the keyboard. “You’ve stopped typing.”
“No, I was just thinking,” I say, placing my hands on the keys. “I’m ready.”
Ezol Day looks at me as if she’s studying misfortune. Then she begins dictating.
“Consider this. Okchamali is the Choctaw word for both blue and green,” she says. “Its roots appear in the Choctaw word okchanya, meaning ‘alive.’ Now, where did our people originate? Answer: a world of blue sky and green swamp lands, a watery place. So perhaps okchamali relates to ‘place’ as ‘alive.' ”
“Or ‘lived,’ as in past tense?” I ask.
She shakes her head passionately. “Not past tense, exactly,” she says. “Okchamali could be a description of a place name of a primeval epoch when the sky and the sea were so close that there was almost no atmosphere in between.
In Choctaw it is the subtle shading, the intensity and grayness, the dullness or brilliance of a thing that determines how it is spoken of. Our language marked the dullness of the sky in that place at that particular time. If it were the primordial beginning of the earth, the visible eye would not have been able to distinguish the shimmering ‘above’ or ‘below.’ Okchamali then becomes a descriptive remnant, the color of a time that the ancient Choctaws experienced or, most likely, knew of. Okchamali, then, signifies life.”
“How is that possible?” I ask.
“Verbs,” she answers, pushing a wisp of hair off her face. She continues rapidly, obviously in her element. “Some Choctaw words are tools, in the same way that numbers are tools. We have evidence in our language that our people experienced other dimensions through our use of particles and verbs which attend to specific movements in and out of spacetime. I asked myself why this was so. The logic I used in my Choctaw theorem of time is built around verbs. I questioned why we should expect our ancestors to synchronize their time with our modern clocks, which are set and reset by the political whims of English speakers.”
“We shouldn’t!” I answer boldly.
She scrutinizes me.
“I mean it,” I say sincerely. “I’ve been living abroad for so long that what little I once knew about Choctaw language I’ve forgotten. But it will come back to me. Besides, I don’t really understand physics, the etymology of our language, or moving bodies in space. What does all this have to do with the Miko Kings and baseball?”
“Everything, Lena! After I understood that there might be other spacetime terms embedded in our language, I looked for them in plants that contain sacred geometric expressions. I studied the patterns in our stomp dances and baseball games. Words make equations the same way that numbers connect us to other dimensions and to okchamali.”
She so rarely calls me by name that I’m caught off guard. Also, I’ve never heard an Indian talk about a baseball game or a stomp dance as a mathematical equation. Although I admit I’ve been away from home for a long time.
“Base-and-ball,” says Ezol, “was a game that was played on every ancient square ground in the southeast. It had two intersecting lines that crossed at the mound where the pitcher stood. Natives played variations of the game all over North and South America long before white people ever arrived in the New World. From the mound, a pitcher was the embodiment of the center pole that could access the Middle, Upper, and Lower Worlds.”
“Did I mention that I once played ball?” I ask.
“When?”
“1970. The same year Grandpa Hank died. I was eleven. Grandmother enrolled me in the Choctaw little league softball program. Every Saturday morning she’d drive us to McAlester so I could play for the Little Chahtas, a girls’ fast-pitch team.”
Now Ezol looks uncomfortable. “What position?”
“Left field.”
“Were you a good hitter?”
“No. I have no athletic abilities and I didn’t learn a thing about the game. That summer I nursed a black eye, four sprained fingers, and I was knocked out cold by a fly ball.” I smile. “It’s been at least thirty-five years and I can still hear Grandmother shouting from the bleachers, Lena, use both hands!”
Suddenly Ezol sits erect in her chair. “That’s right,” she says happily. “Use both hands.”
“I’m sure you’ve heard that a million times.”
Her bright smile fades quickly. “Well no, not exactly.”
Something I said registered with her, an unpleasant memory perhaps. But when she won’t say more I begin typing, hoping she’ll come back to it. “After fast-pitch season ended,” I say, “Grandmother said the blood had just run out on me. She said everyone else in the family loved to play ball except me, and I was a total failure.”
“You weren’t a failure, it just wasn’t your game,” she says softly. “Indians invented all kinds of ball games. Some are for fun. Other games, like stickball, are good training for warriors. Base-and-ball helped with diplomacy between tribes. But not everyone is meant to be a ball player. You’ve traveled all over the world and even learned to speak Ara-bic? That shows you are very accomplished. And I suspect Arabic has a different verb tense system from English.”
“Yes,” I say. “They also have a different notion of time..Arab time.”
We both smile.
“Were you lonely living so far from home?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, yawning and standing to stretch my legs. “But I didn’t realize how isolated I felt until I was home. In November 2005, when one of my close friends was killed, that was really the beginning of the end of my life in Amman.
He was working at the Days Inn in Amman when a terrorist bomb exploded. Then, in the spring of this year, I heard a strange voice during the call to prayer and I began chanting aloud with it.
Allahu Akbar.
The time has come to return home.
Allahu Akbar.
The time has come to return home.
Allahu Akbar.
The time has come to return home.
Allahu Akbar.
The time has come to return home.
Ezol looks down at her lap. “You say you chanted the words four times and then you came home?”
For a moment neither of us speaks. I think I understand what she’s getting at. I spoke of home and now I’m home.
“Something like that,” I say. “Three planes, a bus, a car ride, and Wa’llahe, I finally returned home.”
“What did you say in Arabic?”
“‘By God.’ But it’s never uttered in polite company.”
Ezol smiles at me like a proud parent. “Do you still miss your friend?”
“Yes,” I say, looking away. “I do.”
Briefly I consider asking her if we’re related. We must be. She seems to read me like a book. Besides, why else would her papers have ended up inside the walls of my grandmother’s house? My stern conviction a few hours ago—that I knew my family’s history—now seems childish. Even ridiculous. I make a note to go to the bank and open my safety deposit box and look at the land title and abstract for Grandmother’s house. Perhaps the Day family is mentioned.
I decide to change the subject before she asks me something else personal. “You know, just about everyone in America believes Abner Doubleday invented baseball.”
“A myth,” says Ezol, touching the water glass absentmindedly, then pushing it away. “How plausible is it that white people, who live by the clock and sword, would invent a game without time, one that must be played counter-clockwise?”
Something she says triggers an incident I’d completely forgotten. “Grandmother and I went to an Alikchi, a Choctaw doctor, for a healing ceremony,” I say, excitedly. “It was the summer of 1969. I remember the year because I was ten and could swim in the adult pool at Glenwood Park.”
Ezol seems to be withdrawing, her whole presence elongating and softening, as she does when leaving our sessions.
“What’s wrong?” I ask. “Where are you going?”
“Nowhere,” she says, coming back to the present. “Please go on. The year is 1969. What happened?”
“Grandmother drove us to Tannehill, just outside of McAlester. After awhile, tornado clouds blew in. The winds were howling like a freight train. Grandmother and I had to hold on to a big cottonwood tree to keep from blowing away. I was terrified, but the Alikchi kept on pitching his ax into the ground until the earth opened up a large crater. Then, as the winds died down, he walked counter-clockwise around and around the crater. After awhile the clouds disappeared and the sky was blue again.”
“Who was the ceremony for?” she asks.
“I can’t remember. I was so scared I guess I blocked it out until now.”
“Call it to you!” she snaps. “Call the memory to you, Lena! Who was the ceremony for? You must know.” I nod and promise I’ll try, but I’m sure Grandmother never told me.
Ezol presses me. “What happened to the crater that the Alikchi opened up?”
“It disappeared,” I say, feeling uneasy again.
Ezol’s color returns and she speaks persuasively. “Embedded in these rituals and games are mathematical codes that harness cosmic forces. You witnessed it for yourself.”
“The Alikchi didn’t use a mathematical formula, I know that.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just know.”
“Choctaw language doesn’t distinguish ‘science’ from ‘the sacred,” she says. “The Alikchi might be surprised to know he couldn’t be a mathematical physicist, since he could split the clouds and open a passage to another time and space.”
“I didn’t mean to imply that he was primitive,” I say, defensively. “He just didn’t use math.”
“Why do you keep saying that?” asks Ezol. “Indians in North and South America built cosmic observatories in the form of mounds and pyramids, very complicated structures that require geometry. A stomp dance and a baseball game mimic natural phenomena, such as tornado winds, that are counter-clockwise. Why can’t you believe that the Alikchi knew how to interact with the chaos?”
“Listen,” I say curtly. “I may not know Choctaw language, but I know that the Alikchi was not a scientist and he was not a god.”
“So you do remember more than you let on!”
“I don’t know..yes. Maybe…I don’t know.”
Ezol smiles. “I thought so.”
Silence.
“But I still don’t think baseball is a sacred game,” I say, still defensive.
“Don’t confuse our ancient game with the one that’s been assimilated into America’s consciousness,” she snaps. “Re-member that the first thing whites did during their civil war was exclude blacks from playing on their baseball teams.
Later they excluded Jews. But base-and-ball, our game, was created so that we could include everyone. We played the game to collaborate with other tribes, the stars, and with the great mystery. The game is past time for a reason.”
Again she’s pulled me up short. I mouth the words past time and let the concept wash over me. “There’s no time limit in baseball.”
“Or any other Native game,” she says sharply. “Why is that?”
Silence.
“But you are right about our Alikchi,” says Ezol, her voice softening as she touches the glass of water. “They are much more like healers working in collaboration with the earth’s mathematical systems. That’s the power Hope Little Leader had.”
“What do you mean?”
“With his hands Hope could collaborate with nature. Hope was special, and Blip and the others knew it. They loved him for it, but it’s because of his recklessness that we all ended up…” Ezol pauses and tears well up in her eyes, “…..forgotten. Like your memory of the healing ceremony. If that isn’t bad enough…”
I finish her sentence, “..you’re telling your story to someone who has cared very little about baseball. Someone who never once considered how an Alikchi shifts time and space, or how a physicist reckons them. All I’ve got is a belief that you are here with me now.”
Ezol shakes her head. “You have a little more than that,” she says.
At moments like this I have the strangest sensation that we’re mirror images of one another, that we both seem to be searching through our pasts for answers.
Ezol shifts uncomfortably in her chair and then stands up. As she walks around the room she touches every object.
“Time is like a majestic dance,” she says. “Observe how I can step forward or backwards or sideways and form multiple patterns that intersect.”
“Which is how you’re here with me now, but also in another time and space?”
“Something like that,” she says a little wistfully. “Your time and my time are two distinct patterns, but they intersect.
That’s why I’m here.”
I remind her that along with the photograph of the Miko Kings, I have a copy of Carl Laemmle’s film that she and the ballplayers appeared in. I also have a letter from the U.S. Patent Office rejecting her paper on Choctaw time.
“The envelope is postmarked November 1, 1907,” I say. “A record of you and your theory does exist.”
Ezol looks aggrieved, as if she didn’t know about the rejection letter. How could she not know? Even in 1907 she must have known it was impossible to patent ideas.
“I found a 1904 newspaper clipping about the Crazy Snake delegation going off to Washington D.C. without asking permission of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Captain A. Clarke Tonnor. The article said Henri Day sent the Crazy Snake delegation enough money to return to Ada. But so far I’ve found very little else about players and their families.”
“The money actually came from the Four Mothers Society, a group that tried to stop the allotting of our lands. Uncle Henri was covering for them. In the first year, 1904, almost half of our baseball ticket sales were going to the Four Mothers Society. Aunt Emma, Uncle Henri’s mother, was one of the leaders until she died in 1906.”
Ezol walks over to the desk and begins writing on my yellow notepad. “The only photograph of Hope that I liked was taken in Hampton, Virginia, three years before I met him,” she says. “He had a look of innocence, the look of not knowing the power that would come for him. I suspect the picture is still there if you go look for it.”
I smile meekly as I read over her list.
“You better get started on your research,” she quips. “I can see you have a lot of holes in your education.”
At the top of the page, she’s written three mathematical equations, “John Lennon,” and “Four Mothers Society.” I can’t imagine why she wants me to research the Beatles. At the bottom of the page she’s scribbled, “Find out what happened to John. Also, you can look for Hope Little Leader’s records at Hampton Normal School for Blacks and Indians.”
But before Ezol disappears, I ask her about Hope’s pitches. “I don’t know anything about pitching. How did he make the ball reverse itself?”
“Have you ever seen Michelangelo’s painting of how God created Adam?”
“Yes,” I say.
Ezol wiggles the fingers on her right hand. “It’s all in the velocity of the fingertips, no?” She gestures toward the window. “Dawn arrives,” she says. “See how the moon scorches away in a cloud of light and steam. Gone in the blink of an eye. Of course, if there were people on the moon they could not discern this event because we see it from our vantage point on earth.”
“So…” I think out loud, my head spinning, “the Alikchi knew how to shift his vision so he could see everything all at once?”
Again Ezol smiles as if I were a small child that had just amused her. She places her hands on the small of her back and stretches first to the left, then right. A strange gesture for a spirit. Then she walks around the desk to stand beside my chair and studies the computer screen.
“Captured light?” she asks.
I nod in agreement.
“Do all the colors of the visible spectrum appear here?”
“I’m not sure,” I say. “Maybe a million shades or variations of colors are…”
“Shush,” she says. “Please type the names of the men who played for Miko Kings and the positions they played. I want to see them appear in the light. Later, I’ll tell you everything that happened. All I know about space and time and baseball as medicine. But first, type their names.”
She stands completely still, as if overtaken by a memory marked with grief. I don’t think she even breathes.
Miko Kings
- Centerfield: Nolan Berryhill, Creek
- Left Field: Blip Bleen, Chickasaw-Choctaw
- Second Base: Isom Joel, Choctaw
- Right Field: Oscar Pickens, Chickasaw
- Catcher: Albert “Batteries” Goingsnake, Cherokee
- Third Base: Napoleon Bonaparte, Choctaw
- First Base: Lucius Mummy, Mississippi Choctaw
- Shortstop: Theo Porter, Seminole-Creek
- Pitcher: Hope Little Leader, Choctaw
She gently touches the screen where Blip’s name appears, as if lamenting his bruised body after a particularly tough series. A loss. When she’s this close, I can see the large blue-green veins that run along the back of her hand like rivers on a map. How is it possible for a spirit to also be flesh and blood?
Ezol smiles down at me. “Blip once said he was ‘Chick-Choc,” she says softly. “Then he would do something squinty with his eyes—and I would always laugh.”
She continues gazing into the screen beyond his name, locked into a landscape of light, farther away than the farthest universe, toward all our lives in Indian Territory.
And I type.
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