Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [9]
The professionally taken photographs of Allen and Ollie Hill tell a different story from the snapshot of my maternal grandparents. The professional studio settings of the one show prosperity, whereas the bleak farm background of the other shows only austerity. Allen and Ollie Hill are photographed separately, speaking to me of their very different personalities. The one photograph of my grandmother shows her serious nature. In her time her square-jawed, well-defined features might have been described as handsome. The lines and wrinkles on her face show the stresses of her middle-aged years, but her eyes indicate a sense of peace. Photographs of my grandfather are more numerous than of any other grandparent. In each his dress is complete with jacket, tie, and overcoat and hat tilted to the side. The photograph of Allen Hill as a young man shows not only his style but his soft good looks. As he aged, he retained the style but his looks became hardened—perhaps by years of “good living,” perhaps by illness. That he enjoyed his life is not apparent from his expression.
I never knew any of my grandparents’ generation. I do not even have familiar names to refer to them. I study their photographs searching for some clue of the stories that time, personality, and the circumstances of birth have robbed me of. These photographs, along with a few vignettes that my Uncle George and parents tell, are for me the only tangible pieces of evidence of my past. They make up an incomplete portrait of my American heritage. Though Ida and Henery Elliott and Allen and Ollie Hill never knew me, I often wonder what they, having lived so close to slavery and through racial hostility, might have thought of their granddaughter’s life—a life with so few barriers as to be incomparable.
Both sets of my grandparents were like thousands of blacks, some former slaves and some barely a generation from slavery, who arrived in Oklahoma with hopes of greater opportunity. The history of the area, a place of aspirations often unrealized, is a complex one. Much of it had formerly been Indian Territory, and served as the home of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Creek tribes after the Louisiana Purchase and their relocation to the land in the 1830s. Blacks came with each of these tribes, either as slaves or as freedmen. For example, blacks made up 37 percent of the tribal roll of the Creek Nation. They had also been prominent in the tribal leadership of the Seminole tribe and constituted two separate bands of the Seminoles. Prior to 1889, the five tribes, and later approximately seventy additional relocated tribes, existed together on the land despite differences in language, culture, and tradition. But in 1889 the government opened the “unassigned” land to settlement by whites and divided the area into Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory. And it was the settlement of whites within the boundaries which opened the door for statehood in 1907.
In addition to the blacks who came to Oklahoma Territory with the relocated Indians following the Civil War, a number of black freedmen had relocated to Oklahoma from the South to escape the harsh treatment they’d received there. In the late 1800s the antilynching advocate Ida B. Wells encouraged groups of black settlers to leave Tennessee and relocate in southeast Oklahoma, then part of Oklahoma Territory. Several viable black townships sprang up with the help of the railroad. The best known is Boley, Oklahoma, which, in its prime, boasted a post office, two banks, and its own city government. Prior to statehood in 1907, rumors that the federal government might set aside all or part of Oklahoma Territory as a freedmen state encouraged even more blacks to come.