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CHAPTER 1
The Forgotten City
Buster Youngwolfe could have seen the downtown Tulsa skyline if not for the trees that barricaded the horizon. Downtown was just a few miles from his home in the slums of north Tulsa, but in many ways it was a different city — a different world — from his. The steel and glass towers to the west were barely specks in the distance at Sixteen Hundred North Yale Avenue. This was the forgotten city. Its inhabitants were those left behind on the long march toward progress. Buster was one of them.
Just twenty-one years old, the young Cherokee man still acted as if he were a boy in many ways, making it hard for him to hold on to a job. While he could be immature and even reckless at times, he hid a sharp mind behind his shy, wary eyes. He was reticent and loved to read, when he could find a book, and hated more than anything to be thought of as a "dumb Indian." Whether people ever called him that or it was an internalized, prevailing fear, the specter haunted Buster all his days. Smart as he was, without steady work and with a wife and baby boy at home, Buster wasn't afforded the luxury of wondering what his life could have been. His life as it was kept him busy.
Buster spent his days seeking workman's wages as a journeyman roofer. As with the other residents of the forgotten city, life was hard for Buster. The pursuit of happiness, which had been embraced by millions, ended here, beyond the boundaries of the American Dream. The picket fences and lush green lawns of America in the 1950s that have been etched into our collective consciousness were nowhere to be found here. Only dry soil and damp swamp.
Ten homes total were in these slums. A handful sat on top of a tiny hill, while the rest were in the depths below. The neighborhood was surrounded by woods, with a wide, barren field in front, the final resting place for a few uprooted trees and shrubs.
Before statehood, this north Tulsa neighborhood was a little town called Dawson. It was named in honor of Wilbur A. Dawson, a Cherokee Indian and postmaster of the community's first post office, established in 1895. Dawson was the area's name, but it was known as Coal Bank. While Tulsa earned a global reputation for oil, the land was also pregnant with coal, and the most fertile area was in Dawson. Coal kept homes warm, trains running, and jobs plentiful. It put roofs over people's heads and food in their children's bellies. Coal was life here.
The Smith Brothers, the Leavell Coal Company, and the Hickory Coal Company owned the strip mines that made Dawson prosperous and kept mining a booming business from 1920 to 1950. It was only three years ago that the earth ran dry, within living memory for Dawson residents in 1953, but it might as well have been decades ago. Dawson had been absorbed into the city of Tulsa, and the strip mining industry left, taking its jobs with it.
The coal companies that had once made this area prosperous had abandoned it, leaving nothing behind but the strip pits. These strip pits formed scars in the land so wide and deep that they had gathered rainwater and become streams. You could ride a boat through them.
Just a few blocks to the east was a slaughterhouse, which on humid days scented the air with the stench of pig flesh. If you got close enough, you could hear the high-pitched screams of the pigs as they died.
The homes here were not houses but tar paper shacks. Though the city of Tulsa had condemned the shacks, people still lived in them, for they had no place else to go. The homes were nothing but two or three tiny rooms, with dirt floors and ceilings so low you had to slouch. The only heat came from stoves that burned wood, coal, or whatever else you could find. The kitchens were no more than six-by-six-foot enclosures. The bedrooms were slightly larger, with enough room for a few beds, where everyone slept beside each other like medieval serfs. People sat on rope-bottomed boxes or logs, with boards nailed across for their backsides. There were no sewers, so residents had to walk half a mile to reach the nearest drinking water, which came from an old hand pump. The whole family, sometimes two or three generations, slept together, ate together, did everything together.
Tulsans in 1953 were not hostile or even ambivalent about this place or its people; they were simply unaware. They knew the city was segregated by economic classes, the same as it was in many towns. But Tulsans could not have imagined the depths of poverty in their midst or that men, women, and children — families — could call the slums home.
The Tulsa most residents knew was nothing like this neighborhood. The city they lived in was a model of the 1950s American ideal. Watching newsreel footage from this era is similar to seeing images from a dream, blissful memories in fading technicolor. Tulsa was the centerpiece of a region known as Green Country, a halfway point between the golden plains to the west and the Ozark Mountains to the east. Verdant hills and lush trees existed alongside some of the most spectacular skyscrapers in the American southwest. With some of the nation's most elegant art deco and zigzag-style architecture, downtown Tulsa's buildings are the legacy to the oilmen who built them — for example, the Philtower and the Philcade Buildings financed by oil baron Waite Phillips and the Cosden Building, named for oilman Joshua Cosden, to name a few. In 1957 Reader's Digest magazine would christen Tulsa as "America's Most Beautiful City." The title was just as deserved in 1953 as well, though it did not extend to the north Tulsa slums.
"Burn 'em down," some city employees said. The problem was, people still lived there. Where were they supposed to go? Nobody had an answer. So the shacks stayed, sitting as if the area was a black stain on a new dress, an embarrassment to this blossoming, beautiful young city. But to the families who lived here, these eyesores were the only things they had besides each other. Multiple generations crowded together not so much in harmony but from inevitability. They were surprisingly cheerful, as there was no sense in being unhappy. It is the paradox of poverty: When everybody has it as bad as you do, you don't realize you are poor. It's just life.
All things considered, it was not a bad place to be a kid. Santa ran out of toys before he got to your house, and your birthday was no different from any other day, but none of that mattered when you didn't know what you didn't have. For a child, this neighborhood promised wide-open spaces. No fences. No boundaries. No prohibitions. Just lots of room to run, jump, and play any way you pleased. Simple and carefree as it was being a kid, it was a wonder why any child would have wanted to grow up too fast. But Phyllis Jean Warren wasn't like most children. She never had a chance.
* * *
The north Tulsa slums were the only world Phyllis had ever known, but it was everything a tomboy such as she was could want. Trees were for climbing, fish and frogs were for catching, and dresses were for getting muddy. That was Phyllis. It was what you might expect from a girl who grew up with six brothers — Elmer, twenty-nine; Jimmy, twenty-eight; Kenneth Joe, twenty-five; E.J., twenty-three; Bobby, seventeen; and Billy Dale, thirteen. Phyllis was the baby, just eleven years old, and the only daughter born to Robert and Josie Warren. Bobby and Billy Dale still lived at home, while Elmer had joined the U.S. Army and was stationed in San Antonio, Texas. The other Warrens lived here and there but close to home.
Phyllis liked to play with the Youngwolfe kids, Eddie and Judy Mae. They were Buster Youngwolfe's nephew and niece and were both about Phyllis's age. Her daddy, Robert, didn't like her running around with those Cherokee kids, but living in a neighborhood as small as that, she didn't have much choice. Phyllis and her parents lived in one of the houses on top of the hill, while the Youngwolfes' place was on the bottom. Despite her daddy's protests, Phyllis would trot down the hill to play with them, making sure Robert wasn't home when she did.
"Stay away from those Youngwolfes," her old man would say, though no one knew exactly why. Maybe Robert Warren just needed to feel as if he was better than someone. Whatever a person's lot in life, everybody loves having somebody to look down on. Or maybe it was prejudice, plain and simple. That would be strange given that Robert's son Jimmy had married a Cherokee woman, the former Bessie Youngwolfe. Bessie was Eddie and Judy Mae's grandma and Buster's mother. Robert didn't seem to care that his son married a Cherokee or about Phyllis's safety, for that matter. He and his wife, Josie, would let her run off and play for hours, sometimes days at a time.
The most likely answer was the simplest: Robert was strange. Kids called him "ding-batty" and a "loony bird." A simple man with a slow mind, he was prone to acts of foolishness or outright lunacy. Robert once kept a full-grown mule in the house. He'd have to be crazy to do that, neighbors said. He was a drunk, too, and a mean one at that. There was more to Robert than he let on, though. He made good money working in the steel mills and even better money as a moonshine runner. Some even said he ran moonshine up to some pretty high places. Rumors are rumors, but everybody in the neighborhood knew Robert did well enough that he didn't have to keep his family here, with dirt floors and tar paper walls. Strange man, that Robert Warren. But whatever he was, he was the head of his household and demanded respect. No daughter of Robert Warren's was going to hang around those Youngwolfes. At least, not with him knowing about it.
Besides Robert's being a bit odd, not much happened out of the ordinary around the neighborhood. There was one time that a stranger hid behind a billboard and started firing his rifle at random people. He shot Bessie Warren in the hip, then hit another woman, and probably would have kept going if not for Clarence Youngwolfe, Buster's brother. Clarence told his son, Eddie, to go fetch his .22 rifle and some shells. Anytime the shooter poked his head out from behind the billboard, Clarence fired at him.
The police took their time getting there, but by the time they arrived, Clarence had stopped the madman. The police found him lying behind the billboard, bleeding to death. Clarence had gotten a few shots into him, close enough to his heart to stop him. Nobody ever figured out what the man wanted or even who he was. As far as anyone knew, he was just some nut who got it in his head that he wanted to shoot someone. Had Clarence not been there with his .22, there was no telling who else would have been hit.
That was about as interesting as things got around there until the spring of 1953.
* * *
Time faded slowly on that Thursday evening. It was March 12, 1953. The brutal summer weather was still some time away; that was a blessing, as the Oklahoma humidity could be cruel. Tonight the evening was crisp and cool. The setting sun painted the prairie sky pink. "The angels are baking cookies," folks said about such nights. Nobody was really sure what that meant, but it made perfect sense all the same.
Phyllis played in front of her parent's shack, twirling a purple wildflower through her stubby fingers. She had found it earlier by the creek bed where she liked to roam barefoot with her German shepherd, Smokey. If Phyllis was around, Smokey wasn't far behind. The two were inseparable.
With her curly blonde hair, blue eyes, and freckled face stained with mud and sweat, Phyllis was pretty but rough, resembling a rag doll that had been dropped in the dirt. She had the face of childish innocence, though the rumor among the adults and some of the older kids was that Phyllis was "experienced," an indirect way of saying she was no longer a virgin. If true, today they'd call this by its proper name — sexual assault and rape of a minor. There were rumors about who the culprit was, but nobody knew for sure. Maybe it was her daddy's good friend and fellow moonshine runner Gene Pruitt. Maybe it was one of the many convicted sex felons who were said to live in the neighborhood. Again nobody knew for sure, and nobody cared enough to do anything about it. What happened to Phyllis was nobody's concern. Young girls were to be seen, not heard. Phyllis just did what she was told, no matter what she was told to do.
It was a beautiful night, but Phyllis likely didn't come outside just to admire the twilight. She came to see Buster Youngwolfe, who wandered outside after lullabying his baby boy to sleep so he could catch his own last glimpse of the day. He lived two blocks away, give or take, from the Warrens. Buster was Phyllis's neighbor but also her stepnephew. As noted previously, her older brother Jimmy was married to Buster's mother, Bessie. Jimmy, Bessie, and Buster all lived together with Buster's wife, Betty, and the couple's eight-month-old son, Buster Jr.
Buster and Jimmy were the household's sole breadwinners, but work was scarce for Buster. Even paying the fifty cents a month it cost to keep a roof over his family's head was tough. His family helped with expenses, and the county helped with food. They managed.
Buster was turning twenty-one the next day, March 13, and he had been barhopping since noon with his father, his brother, and a neighbor. They only came home for a bite to eat and planned on going back out. Nothing special. Just a trip downtown to hit up a few more bars, a treat the young husband and father didn't get to enjoy often. Buster probably got restless cooped up in that house. It would be hard not to. There was no doubt he loved his mom, his wife, and his baby boy more than anything, but living in a shack with that many people would wear down anyone.
Buster was still young and virile, but he was now responsible for a wife and child. With no steady job to provide for them, Buster got reckless. Just a few months earlier, in the fall of 1952, Buster had been arrested for breaking into a grocery store. He could have been sent to prison but was placed on a two-year probation instead.
If other people treated Buster differently after his arrest, as though he was untrustworthy or worse, Phyllis likely wasn't one of them. She adored Buster. With his thick black hair, bronzed skin, and stern, brooding brown eyes, Buster cut an imposing figure. Buster could look so serious one moment but give off a glowing, boyish grin the next. It was easy to see how a young girl could develop a crush.
It wasn't just Buster's looks she liked; it was him. Buster didn't treat her as the other adults did, as if she were some silly little girl to be seen and not heard — or, worse, to be used and discarded. Buster treated her as a person. He teased her, joked with her, and had fun. He was playful and affectionate. If Buster had gone to prison, there's no doubt it would have broken the girl's heart.
Buster likely noticed her girlish crush and, being slightly immature, probably enjoyed it, but he always saw her as a little sister. Phyllis wanted to be more and was still young enough to think that wanting something was enough. For anyone who has ever suffered through an unrequited childhood crush, one can imagine Phyllis's feelings — a strange, frustrating sensation, painful at times, like a knot in the heart and stomach.
Phyllis perked up as soon as she heard the door slam against Buster's shack and saw him come outside. Buster didn't see her, or if he did, he didn't acknowledge her. The night was now as black as ink as the curtain closed on another long, dreary day in the slums. Buster lit a cigarette. The burning orange orb was all Phyllis could see of him, but it would have been enough to know he was there.
* * *
There was no light left to read and no TVs to watch or radios to listen to, so the families got together and talked. Being the patriarch and the matriarch of the clan, Robert and Josie Warren hosted these chats on their porch. Tonight the group discussed what they usually did — the Reverend Mrs. Leontine Bryant. Reverend Bryant was the seventy-two-year-old ordained minister of the Universal Church of the Master. She was a spiritualist and was said to commune with the spirit world. Her fantastic predictions were particularly appealing to Mae Ellen Warren, who was married to the Warrens' third-eldest son, Kenneth. Her stories of Reverend Bryant caused quite a stir among the ladies in the neighborhood.
Phyllis was not one of them. She didn't have anything to say about that "spiritualist woman," and nobody would have listened to her anyway. Her only concern was getting Buster's attention. She had changed her clothes after school into blue jeans, a red checkered shirt, and a yellow sweater. Robert may have raised his daughter in a squalid, tar paper shack, but every now and then he would treat her to nice clothes even if Phyllis inevitably got them filthy from playing outside.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Oklahoma's Atticus"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Hunter Howe Cates.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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