Okla Hannali Read online

  A MANIFEST OF THE GOODS IN THIS PACKET

  FOREWORD, by Geary Hobson

  PREFACE, by R. A. Lafferty

  PROLOGUE

  The history of the world in a pecan shell. The sand plum was the forbidden fruit. As the White Eyes count the hundreds.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1.The birth and raising of Hannali Innominee. How was it go to be a child then? Barua resigns from the Pushmataha.

  2. Where are your own horses' bones? Okla Falaya, Okla Tannaps, Okla Hannali. Incomprehensible ways. Even the stogie was sacred.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1.When the Innominee were Choctaw rich. We are not indolent we are lazy. Slave is for seven years.

  2. Hound is dog. Who pass law pigs can't run too? Is not a proper fox hunt.

  3. The magnified years. The other end under your chin damn boy damn.

  4. Of fiddle tunes and larger events.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1.Behind God's back. Near Doak's Stand on the Natchez Road. The Devil becomes President of the United States.

  2. Dancing Rabbit Creek and the laws of unaccepted testimony. Greenwood LeFlore and the Mingo. One of the few remaining pleasures in his life.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1. French Town and Five Luck. Hannali becomes Louis.

  2. Hatched out of a big egg. Peter Pitchlynn and Levi Colbert. Pardoning your Reverences, it is not worth a damn.

  3. I will marry the girl I forget her name. From Canadian River to False Washita. A bad report on the land.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1. Old Indians in the new country. Masked men and bull whips. Nineteen thousand five hundred and fifty-four Choctaws.

  2. Of John T. Albert Horse, a gray-eyed Indian, and the little girl Natchez. Strange Choate and the star sparkle.

  3. Of three-forked lightning. What am I, an old boar coon? How Skullyville, Boggy Depot, and Doaksville became the capitals of nations.

  CHAPTER SIX

  1. Whiteman Falaya. Hannali House. Twenty-five big Indians and some generals. A Widdo were with three Wifes.

  2. The end of the French wife. A Canadian River storm. Blood of my liver and clay of my clay.

  3. The man with the talking horses. Name rolls is Indian stuff. The nations in him. Jim Pockmark and Timbered Mountain. Who else knew them all?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  1. Luvinia, Marie d'Azel, Satina. Kill the big Choctaw! The Whiskey Decade.

  2. Green turban and red turban. Count in his castle. Piano, loom, and eyeglasses.

  3. Come to the mountain. Seven hundred years old and blind. Oklafalaya was a magic word. Who summons by dream?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1. Fun in the old Moshulatubbee.

  2. Sequoyah and Moses. Ground to death between a slate and a slate pencil. A cloud I had forgotten.

  3. Sally for a Week, Hazel for Life, Luvinia Forever.

  4. A dead man on a dead horse. Christ has come to our house.

  5. Aleika. Peter Pitchlynn was two different men. The men in Falaya have drunk mules' milk and are sterile.

  CHAPTER NINE

  1. Pass Christian Innominee. “Have I signed a paper says I must swallow a kettle?”

  2. Can you bed down one hundred people at your house? Five Dollar Honest. Chikkih Chikkih. Weeping at Epiphany.

  3. The year of the Big Thunders. Down the Texas Road. The clan thing Devil.

  CHAPTER TEN

  1. Pardon my break in on you like this Commander but I have come to kill one of your men. “Be gone in five minutes or hang!” This bull will still toss. Take you all at once or one at a time.

  2. Welsh Indians. Robert Jones and the five hundred slaves. The man named Six-Town is the other pole of it.

  3. The day when Hannali was no longer ugly. Famous Innominee and his brothers. The Big Decade. Alabaster Hills and Great Salt Plains.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1. About green Indians. The Canadian River goes to Santa Fe. The California Road.

  2. Tow-headed Choctaw. A Durham bull and a wife named Helen. Barnful of children.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  1. Moth-eaten Moses. The sick lion. The man who lost his magic.

  2. The Freedom Indians. Forbis Agent and the broadsheets. The snake we cannot kill.

  3. Which woman have wet mud feet? I remember every blade of grass that I have ever seen. The boy with the watery eyes.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  1. The United Nations was established at North Fork Town in 1861. There are men here today who would lead like sheep. Robert Jones owns the Choctaws.

  2. You can buy a lot of Indians with that. Who forged Opothleyahola's name? Brutus is something out of Dumas.

  3. Fashions in Hatred. The Territory Indians die fifty-two times. Thirteen Civil Wars.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  1. Shave by candle. It does smell good burning in the field. By and by I build another boat.

  2. The Laughing Fox. Were Billy Bow-Legs and Alligator comic strip characters? The panoramic God raises fifty-five or sixty men.

  3. Who eats Comanche potatoes? From Tukabatchee Town to Round Mountains. Kiowas smell like mares' milk. What do white men smell like?

  4. Take a Snake Indian as old as the rocks. Cross with Coyote — and he is the Fox!

  5. Gentlemen, that is shooting and that is talking. My brother is the wind.

  6. A ring of bulls. A nation was being murdered that afternoon. Who knows the snake-hair plant?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  1. The withering fire. Was it the father of Travis Innominee or was it his other body beside him in the dusk? I thought we broke them of that boy's trick thirty years ago.

  2. The battle everybody lost. Banter of bugles. The Gibson Road.

  3. Almost to bitter words. House divided. Famous Innominee and the Cherokee Pins.

  4. Chusto Talasah and Chuste Nahlah. Fox is still fox.

  5. The skeleton force. There were no ordinary persons there. The sick lion hunts down the mice. Oh the smoke that will not rise again!

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  1. Why have God punished us so grievously? Sundown Day for us. With the principality.

  2. In Hitchiti Meadow I wait for you. Perfect shooting on the edge. The ghost is fleshed. Time run out.

  3. Great Red Flowering. Dead with her hair still on fire. The end of the world of Hannali Innominee.

  4. Of another part, and in the latter days. Bull blare. Dead family come back to me. Is God silent is there no voice?

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  1. From Cowskin Prairie to Edward's Post. A tired horse and a dry cigar. It ended on July 14.

  2.They drove the nails they had forgotten. Apache to Waco. To reward enemies and punish friends.

  3. Whatever happened to all those Ottawa Indians? When saw you last a Fort-Snelling Sioux?

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  1. The Children's Decades. Underground thunder in Congressional Cemetery. Poor Peter Pitchlynn!

  2.In the old Indian manner on the second syllable. The White Eyes use words curiously. A sharp thing with galena and niter mixed in.

  3. Powerful stuff up out of the cellar. When the towns moved to the railroads. A house at the top of the hard hill.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  1. The garish old light. A cloud of dust that lasted twenty years. Green Interlude. The sign in the sky it say one hundred and sixty acres no more and no less.

  2.Is it the Kiowas or is it far thunder? The last night but one of his life. “Hell, let's swim it,” said the horse. The old Adam voice.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  1. It bedevils me if I can even think of a witty way to die. What are we, white people, that we kid each other? He was a Mingo.

  2.Why we gathered here then, to play pinochle? Hell is full of men who
die with dignity. The smoke has gone up.

  FOREWORD

  By Geary Hobson

  Hannali Innominee Century

  R. A. Lafferty has been firmly established as a widely respected science-fiction writer for well over twenty years. The winner of a Hugo Award in 1973, he has been nominated for the same prize, and for the Nebula Award as well, numerous times. Novels such as Past Master, The Reefs of Earth, Fourth Mansions, and The Devil is Dead trilogy, and the short story collections Nine Hundred Grandmothers and Strange Doings, are testimony to his secure niche in the realm of science fiction. Often overlooked, however, are Lafferty's historical novels, works such as The Fall of Rome and The Flame is Green, and especially Okla Hannali. Indeed, this last-named novel, published originally in 1972, quickly became a major contribution to the surprisingly small body of good fiction written about American Indians over the past generation.

  Unfortunately, Okla Hannali did not stay in print very long — probably less than three years altogether. It is therefore pleasing to booklovers and students of American Indian history that the University of Oklahoma Press is bestowing on this novel a second life by reprinting it. For those who missed it when it made its debut, the treat of discovery is before them in this rather unusual, totally extraordinary book. And it is unusual, and it is extraordinary. The epic life-journey of the book's protagonist, Hannali Innominee, a larger-than-life Choctaw politician, businessman, trader, farmer, ferryman, town builder, fiddler, culture-keeper, and mingo (Choctaw for headman) is one which parallels almost precisely the turbulent history of the Choctaws in the nineteenth century.

  Born sometime around 1800 in the Okla Hannali district of the Choctaw Nation, in the land that later came to be called Mississippi, Hannali Innominee (the accents for both names fall on the second syllable) lives almost the entire century, dying at last in 1900 at his home in an east-central Oklahoma community that had been, up to a generation before, an important town of the Choctaw Nation of Indian Territory. In the course of Hannali's life, a life always inextricably intertwined with the destiny of kinspeople in his tribal district (hence the book's title), the Choctaw Nation undergoes cultural changes that parallel the course of Manifest Destiny during America's “century of dishonor.”

  As one of the “Five Civilized Tribes,” the Choctaws were in the nineteenth century, as historian Angie Debo has labeled them elsewhere, a republic, and as thoroughgoing a republic as could be found anywhere in the world at the time. Lafferty chronicles the tribe's history from the time of America's early process of nation-building and land-grabbing to the eve of Oklahoma's statehood, when it is assumed the Choctaws — and all other Indians in the region — merged into the dominant white society. Such an absolute, however, is far from the actual truth. In 1991, it is estimated there are approximately 250,000 Indians in Oklahoma — not an inconsiderable number for a “disappeared” people. As Lafferty delineates Hannali Innominee in the novel, there is something immutable about the Choctaw character that will always endure despite the racial intermixture and the superimposed laws and religions of the white American culture. On his deathbed, Hannali knows that his white-blooded granddaughter, Anna-Hata, with her “eyes like blue cornflowers and hair like corn,” is indubitably Choctaw and that “the world had not run out of Indians yet.”

  Okla Hannali is, first and foremost, a novel about survival. Hannali Innominee and his fellow Choctaws endure the Removal era of the 1830s, the Civil War (and the attendant twelve separate little civil wars that beset some of the tribes during this time), the massive influx of the invading white settlers in the quarter-century following the war, the federally enforced termination legislation, and the culture-threatening land allotment system. At the end of the novel, Lafferty shows that, despite all these catastrophes, there are still Choctaws around.

  Okla Hannali is an excellent fictional rendering of American Indian views (and in this case more particularly, the Choctaw view) of American history and Indian Territory during the last century. Anyone who has endured the milksop, watered-down, enwhitened view of Oklahoma history as taught in high schools all around Oklahoma is advised to read this book with extreme caution. Such readers are further enjoined to not be surprised to hear that there are indeed Indian versions of American history. Okla Hannali very handily provides such a version, and more of them are needed.

  PREFACE

  The trouble is that behind writing something like this there is only the story of long lonesome hard work: that isn't interesting. As to myself, I had no special qualification at all to write this novel. I'm not Indian. One quarter of the people in Oklahoma, a little over half a million people, had some Indian blood in them, but I haven't any. There were at least twenty thousand Choctaw families with grandfather traditions or letters of parallel events to those in Okla Hannali, but I had to come to them as an outsider. Some Choctaw should have written a Choctaw epic, as the great Osage writer John Joseph Mathews wrote The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters (University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), but none of them did.

  I had already decided to write a series of works under the theme and classification of “Chapters of the American Novel.” One of the earlier chapters would almost have had to be an Indian chapter, and I regard Okla Hannali as that chapter. I suppose that I chose the Choctaws because they were always there in the background, a little bit larger than life, and generally silent.

  Anyhow, the facilities were available. The Gilcrease Museum (given to the city of Tulsa by Thomas Gilcrease, “the world's richest Indian”) has an extensive collection of Indian artifacts, paintings, manuscripts, and books. The Civilization of the American Indian Series published by the University of Oklahoma Press then ran to about a hundred books, and I had read all but two or three late ones. There also were many good books put out by the Naylor Company in San Antonio, besides the popular Indian books which didn't need subsidizing and were put out by the regular houses.

  My own earliest Indian connection goes back to the year 1899, fifteen years before I was born. At that time four youngish Irishmen from Iowa homesteaded on adjoining quarter sections somewhere north of present-day Snyder, Oklahoma. They built a shack in the middle of the section where the four quarters came together, and they lived there together. They were Hugh Lafferty, my father; Ed Burke, my mother's brother; Frank Burke, my mother's cousin; and a man named MaGuire. Ed Burke took a job at the Anadarko Indian agency (he was a stenographer as well as a farmer), and he knew very many of the wilder Indians (Quannah Parker and such) in their old age. He learned a lot of Indian lore, most of it apparently true. My father was also full of old Indian stories. My mother came down to Oklahoma several years later than he did, and with a high school diploma and a teacher certificate, she became a school teacher. With a third or so of her students Indian or mixed-blood, she also learned quite a bit about Indians.

  My personal Indian connection began when I was four years old and we moved down to Oklahoma from Iowa (my family had moved back to Iowa twice from their earlier Oklahoma days). This was in Perry, Oklahoma, and early on our first morning there, I ran out into the street and there was a little boy about my size. “Hello” I said. He knocked me down, and I ran in the house crying. I told my mother that a mean little boy had knocked me down. “Don't play with mean little boys,” she said, “just play with nice little boys.” A minute later there was a knock at the door and I heard someone ask my mother if the little boy in there could come out and play. “Yes,” she said, and she told me, “There's a nice little boy out there. Go out and play with him.” I ran out again. Bang! He knocked me down again. He was the same blamed kid. He was a Pawnee Indian boy and was, as far as I know, the first Indian I ever met.

  In every school class I have ever been in there have been several Indians. Mostly these have been Osages and Cherokees, but there were also a few Choctaws. I've known quite a few Indians quite well in my lifetime and have gotten some interesting talk and history from them. I know them well enough, most of the t
ime, to know when they're kidding and when they're giving me the straight stuff. I've also learned that there's some whoppers about themselves that they really believe and that there's a lot that most of them don't know about their history.

  Okla Hannali was first written in 1963. It was a torturous undertaking even though it wasn't much more than an overflowing of crammed notebooks: I wasn't a very good novel writer at that time. It has since been completely rewritten twice. In the various writings of it and studies for it, I have picked up quite a bit of the non-Indian history of my own region also.

   — R. A. Lafferty

  Tulsa, Oklahoma

  PROLOGUE

  The history of the world in a pecan shell. The sand plum was the forbidden fruit. As the White Eyes count the hundreds.

  The first persons on our earth were two brothers — Chatah and Chickasah. They emerged onto land from a cavern under the Gulf of Mexico. From them are descended the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indian nations and all other nations whatsoever.

  It has been more than twenty generations but less than thirty since the brothers first came up onto earth. There are those who pretend to a greater antiquity for mankind on earth, but the fact is that we are boys only and have all the awkwardness of boys. It was but the day before yesterday that the two brothers established the nations. It was yesterday only that the nations scattered. It was less than yesterday that several of these nations — much changed by their wanderings  — returned to their homeland.