Grandmother's Love for Literature and Culture

 

As I mentioned in my last post, Mamma had been raised to be a lady, and to love culture. And she wasn’t the only one. There was a poetry society in Pauls Valley. Every month the ladies would get together and read poetry, that written by famous authors and poems they had written themselves. Mamma named her second oldest son Homer, after the author of the Odyssey and Iliad. She had a pet banty rooster she named Chanticleer, the clever rooster who outsmarted Reynard the Fox in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale.

She was also a member of the Alternate Saturday Club, formed in 1897 “to promote social, intellectual and moral culture.” The ladies wrote essays on works by leading authors, presented recitations, musical programs, and held discussions of current and past events.

In 1907, when Oklahoma became a state, small communities around the country were growing, and making an effort to improve their lives. Two national organizations grew out of this need, the Lyceum Movement and the Chautauqua Institute. The Chautauqua Institute was the one which sent teams to visit Pauls Valley. It was founded originally as a religious movement, but soon offered academic subjects, music, art and drama, sending out teams to small towns across the country. Prominent speakers and performers appearing on the Chautauqua circuit included William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, John Philip Souza and the American Opera company. They usually performed plays also, and Wenonah told me that the girls would all fall in love with the leading man.

In 1910 one of Mamma’s Chickasaw friends, Jessie Moore, visited the Chautauqua Institute in New York, and sent her this postcard. She wrote:

My expectations of Chautauqua were real, but the realization exceeds anything I ever dreamed. Could I afford it would come here every summer of my life. I nearly run my feet off for fear I will miss something. Will be home Sept – kiss Mahota (Aunt Kaliteyo’s middle name.) Lovingly, Jessie Moore^[i]

                                          Post Card from Jessie Moore, 1910

 

Mamma had an impressive library, with a set of books of poetry and literature, another about European history, and a set of children’s books called the Children’s Hour, that she read to her children from. She also had many novels, histories and biographies: the complete works of Edgar Allen Poe, novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Mark Twain, you name it. Mamma never passed up a book store. She even had a copy of the Dawes Commission Rolls. My mother Wenonah said she never had to go to the school library to find background for a report. There was always plenty of information among Mamma’s books.

I gravitated toward the adventure stories: the James Fenimore Cooper books about the Algonquin Indian tribes, the Tarzan series, Pistol Pete’s autobiography, Mark Twain's tales of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, books about Comanche torture, about Isaac Parker, the “Hanging Judge,” who had sent Sam Paul, my great grandfather, to prison. Here’s a picture of Mamma’s copy of "Tarzan of the Apes," that I read surreptitiously after my bedtime, by flashlight.

                                                Tarzan of the Apes, First Edition, 1914

It was contagious. Visiting Mamma in the summers I would spend most of my time reading. My mother was an avid reader also, and she loved poetry, as did my Uncle Haskell. Actually, Pappa loved poetry too. After his death, a book of poems was found next to him open to the poem, “The House by the Side of the Road,” by Sam Walter Foss, which, as I claim in my book, “Wenonah’s Story,” was a plea for forgiveness.

Mamma left copies of several poems among her papers, none with the authors’ names though. The only one I’m sure she wrote herself is this one. which she enclosed it in a letter to Wenonah in 1948. She was sick and lonely.

Dear Jim:  I’ve neglected to write, only wanted to feel better. The wind has almost killed me. The dust has nearly choked me to deth. The mussels of my throat hirt so bad that I could hardly turn in bed. Still I have seen wind worse. I have done nothing to bring this on. I am and have taken care of myself. It is spent me. I am worn out and useless… 

The Mystic Bridge of Snow 

The nite is dim thoe snowflakes falling fast

through the still air. The earth is growing cold & while

beneath this soft pure covering through this gloom,

I see affar a Mystic Bridge of Snow

 

It falls from your high casement near yet far

Oh straight my trembling fancy to its glow.

Forms a white pathway of these falling flakes

& crosses on this Mystic Bridge of Snow            

 

The snow flakes tap against my window pane.

I heed them not. Their mistery is I cannot know.

That they have crosssed to me this winter nite.

Upon a frozen white Bridge of falling snow.

 

I stand outside the nite is dark & cold.

Within that room. There’s warmth I cannot know

the fire doth make a summers glow.

Thoe nite is white with mystic falling snow

 

Its cold as deth out here alone

the light has vanished in the cold & gloom

without some guide to light this lonely way.

I cannot cross again this Bridge of snow

 

The light has vanished it is dethly cold.

The earth is hidden in a gleam of light. I see

Only my heart’s deep longing formed. This Bridge 

Between me & this Mystic falling snow.

 

 

 

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[i] Jessie Moore was a remarkable person. She was an attorney, passing the bar in 1923, serving as clerk for the state supreme court, the second woman elected to a state office in Oklahoma. She served on the Board of the Oklahoma Historical Society for 35 years. She was appointed Assistant Commissioner of Charities and Corrections for Oklahoma, and was head of the Women’s division of Emergency Relief during the depression. And with all that she found time to serve as president of the Alternate Saturday Club in Pauls Valley. From Chronicles of Oklahoma, Vol XXXIV, Number 4, 1956.