Hittin' the Dust Bowl Trail

I live on the cusp of Haight-Ashbury at Frederick and Shrader Street. My grandpa--or Pop, as the grandchildren like to call him--used to live two blocks south of me, at 144A Grattan Street. Before hippies were lounging on Haight, listening to Janis Joplin in an LSD haze, Pop was zooming up and down the hills of Cole Valley on his bike as a delivery boy for The San Francisco Chronicle. In 1942, his father had moved the family to the Bay Area, in hopes of working in the shipyards.

A decade earlier, Pop was part of the Okie migration to California in the 1930s. The Coxes moved out west in a rusted Ford flatbed along with thousands of other migrant workers. Pop and his four other brothers and sisters picked cotton along the way and slept in the Ford at night. School was a luxury, but Pop’s mom enrolled him every time the family stopped to work. At the tender age of 12, he learned two things fast. The first was that life was hard in a migrant family. The second? The only thing worse than being an Okie was having Indian blood.

I made my own migration to San Francisco from San Diego in August 2010. I prefer tofu instead of steak, blue states over red states and think Sundays are for sleeping in. I am, without a doubt, the outlier of the Cox family. Pop and the rest of my family have lived in Fresno for all or most of their lives. Pop tolerates my vegetarianism and applauds when I play his century-old ragtime piano. But other than that, we don’t agree on much. Can you imagine what our relatives back in Oklahoma might think of me? Pop has never even met them.

Everybody knows that white settlers fornicated with the indigenous people, but nobody in the Midwest liked to acknowledge it, much less discuss it. It was only rumored that there was Native American blood in the Cox family, and it has remained as mythology throughout the generations. Pop has the names of our long-lost relatives living in Oklahoma that could possibly lead me to discovering the truth about my heritage.

This July I am making my reverse migration back to Oklahoma. I will ride trains and hitchhike through the Great American West and stay with the people I meet along the way. From Baghdad by the Bay to the Bible Belt, or something clever like that.

In my skinny jeans and swooping bangs, I will knock on doors in Marshall, Muskogee or wherever my search takes me, in an attempt to prove the existence of my Indian blood.

When I return to San Francisco, I will turn my adventure into a work of creative non-fiction. In it, I will explore themes of ethnic-hybridity, economic disparity, spirituality, family bonds and racism. It will also include historical fact on Native Americans, the Dust Bowl during the 1930s and the part my family played in that history. I have relatives who are amateur genealogists, but this project will far exceed their efforts.

This blog will keep you updated as I hit the road, in the finest tradition of Steinbeck, Guthrie and Kerouac.