Pain awoke Leo Torres. His head throbbed, his throat ached, and there was the smell of chemicals around and through him in some nauseatingly dark, hot, cramped space. The floor beneath his crumpled body shook. Periodically, he would feel himself rising slightly, then crashing again to the flooring beneath him. He realized that he had been drugged, then stuffed into a moving compartment. There was barely space to move his hands. Leo began feeling, as much as he could, around the metallic perimeters of his confinement. No way out!
Eventually, the motion stopped. The ceiling rose. Early daylight and fresh air rushed in. Leo could see armed men looking in at him. As they jerked him out of the compartment, he could see that he had been in the trunk of an automobile. His legs and arms ached as they returned to usefulness. The men hustled him into a building and threw him down on a wooden bench.
“Do you know where you are?” one of them asked him. Leo would not respond.
“You’re in the Seminole Mission Church. We brought you here to get some things straightened out.”
The man wore dress pants, probably part of a business suit, and a white shirt. There was a pistol in his belt. Four other men, all armed with rifles or pistols, stood watching Leo carefully. It seemed a good time to be quiet and listen.
“We brought you here because things have gone so far wrong,” the man continued. “Before you leave, we’re going to put them right again.”
“Get him some water,” he said to the surrounding men.
Without speaking, Leo took the water and tasted it carefully. His throat hurt slightly less, and he was experiencing a return of his faculties, but it didn’t matter to Leo, because he didn’t intend to use them. Doing nothing, as a strategy, usually comes out better than most of the other choices.
“OK,” the spokesman continued, “Let me give you a little background on this place you’ve come to.” Leo waited. “We’ve got along, over the years, pretty well. People go about their business and don’t bother one another. Me and these other men were, are, the business leaders that keep things going smoothly. We never paid attention to world politics because it didn’t make any difference to us here. Things went all right and there was no reason to change them.
‘Now, people are trying to force a bunch of unnecessary changes on us and on all the people around here. Everything is upside down. Kids, some of them our own kids, are running around with guns issuing orders. We can’t turn on the lights and we can’t even drive our cars, they say.”
Leo pointedly ignored him while looking around his surroundings. Everything was made of wood. The floors might have been polished some years ago. The wooden benches with high wooden backs, while not comfortable, were smooth and grand. The ceiling was inordinately high. The windows alternated between big views of the outside and crude stained glass with religious themes. People came here, possibly still come, to sing songs and exchange emotions.
There was a doorway with an unlit “exit” in front of Leo and to the left. Leo assumed there would be a big double doorway at the rear of the church. He could see no easy escape and no way to fight back, but he was reasonably sure that these men, who certainly weren’t professionals, wouldn't torture or murder him while he was in one of their churches. Whatever their intentions, they would, sooner or later, have to move him somewhere else, and the opportunities might be different then.
The men watching Leo, with the exception of their spokesman, still had their weapons drawn, but they seemed uneasy. Had they expected Leo to be other than passive? Or did they really have any idea at all what they were doing? The speaker, too, seemed to be running out of words. Instead of his initial aggressive tone, he seemed to be shifting toward argumentation. He wasn’t “laying down the law” anymore, but was trying to get Leo to agree with him.
“We understand, all right, that you’ve had a lot of trouble with fossil fuel pollution in other parts of the world, and we know there are big shortages here and there, but you need to understand that those conditions don’t extend to here. We grow our own food, and we have good, clean, natural gas popping out of holes that have been there for decades. There’s no reason that Konowa and the surrounding areas can’t go on like we did before. In fact, we could probably be very useful to the outside, if we were just allowed to use what’s naturally ours.
‘A few words from you, Mr. Commissioner, could ...” were the last words the spokesman ever said. The bullet pierced his throat, right at his adam’s apple, and took out the back of his neck. Leo hit the floor before the crumpling body did. From the back, long guns preceded a new armed group into what had been known as a sanctuary.
The four masked men fumbled away their weapons and tried to raise their hands. Two of them didn't even get that far, but fell backward in the fusillade, splattering and gurgling blood. The two closest to Leo were screaming for mercy and reaching for redemption at the church ceiling. They hadn't realized, but Leo did, that they were only alive because Leo was between them and the smoking rifles. These new shooters had to be some kind of rescuers!
The nearest rifleman moved close to Leo. He signaled with a wave of his gun barrel toward two panic-stricken former kidnappers, and they moved toward the door.
"Welcome to Oklahoma, Commissioner," the young man said in a gruff voice. Then he used his rifle muzzle to prod each of the two new corpses on the sanctuary floor. Satisfied that neither moved, he stood attentively by Leo, but did not speak again. Leo resumed his seat.
As the other rifle bearers followed their two new prizes through the shattered door, all of them stepped aside to allow a new figure to enter. Leo waited to talk to the person who had ordered the assault.
She was small, red headed, and freckled. Her swaggering step and the big pistol on her hip seemed overstated. She wanted it clear that she was in charge. These youths, Leo surmised, were the "people with guns," and he was about to meet their leader.
She walked straight to Leo without even a glance at the oozing bodies on the floor. She nodded her flaming tresses at the rifleman, who turned to leave, and spoke directly to Leo.
"Are you all right, Commissioner?" Her eyes were flashing steel-blue.
"Unhurt," Leo said.
"Do you know where you are?
"Just what they told me."
"This used to be the Seminole Baptist Mission outside of Sasakwa. The men who hijacked you are from Konowa. They used to be in charge over there." She paused, to let "used to be" soak in.
"I'm Otharine Jones. It was the Jones Family who just rescued you."
Leo waited to hear more, and she continued: "I found out that you were abducted when I went to Dr. John's place for you. We found it pretty easy to track that automobile, there hasn't been one driven around here for months. But I figured they had one, somewhere. By the way, do you need it, the car?
"No."
She yelled back toward the door, "Bust it up!" Back to Leo, she resumed her official tone. "Unless you have some other orders, or inclinations, I think we ought to get some breakfast now. OK?"
With a nod, Leo followed her outside, where the rifle bearers, Leo could now see that there were dozens of very young men and women, had their two captives kneeling in a supplicant position by the side of the road and were busily and cheerfully smashing up the automobile with shotgun blasts.
"Bust it up," Ms Jones repeated to her lieutenant, the young man who had spoken to Leo earlier. "Look around a little bit to make sure there aren’t any more of them, then pull those dead ones out and lay them over the wreck. Leave them like that for anybody else who feels like taking a drive in an automobile. Stick the prisoners in the old City Hall. Then we're through for now. I'm going to take the Commissioner over to Greeley's and then around a little bit. We'll take one pony and you can have somebody ride double."
Pony?
In the trees near the church, horses were tied. For the first time since he was kidnapped, Leo became aware of twinges of nervousness. In what most people would consider an adventurous life, Leo Torres had never even been close to a large animal, let alone being expected to ride one!
His apprehension grew as they approached the group of tied horses. Their big round eyes watched the approaching humans, and they shifted around in what Otharine might consider normal moves but, to Leo, seemed surly and menacing.
She indicated one, a huge --all of them were huge to Leo—animal patterned in black-and-white. "Take the paint," she told him while swinging lightly into her saddle on an even larger red horse. "There's a really good breakfast less than a mile away."
Leo tried to show no hesitation as he walked to the big animal, but it started and shifted away from him as he reached for the saddle.
"Hold it! Hold it!" the redhead broke in. She swung back to the ground. "Come around this way." She led Leo to the horse's left side. "We always get on this side. Off too." She indicated the stirrup where his left foot should go, and Leo tentatively placed his shoe where she directed, but almost fell backward. Jones, he could see, was making an effort to keep from laughing.
When at last he was mounted, the animal began to turn in a slow leftward circle.
"Never mind," Otharine Jones said, and took the reins. Then she mounted her own steed and led Leo's pony behind, with Leo hanging onto a protuberance from the saddle and wishing he could hide behind it.
Leo did not like situations that he didn't control, and he was aware of being absurd. He tried to assess the chances that he might fall as the ambling beast lurched along, or that the horse itself might fall.
Otharine Jones faced forward quietly, but Leo had no trouble imagining what she might have been thinking.
Looking downward from his ungainly perch didn't seem to work out at all for Leo, and he certainly didn't want to look to the right or left and take a chance on losing his balance, so he looked straight forward and tried to salvage whatever pride and dignity possible. As soon as they were completely alone, though, Otharine Jones turned easily in the saddle and propped one leg around her saddle horn. She seemed to take no notice of Leo’s discomfort, or she might have decided to be polite. It was possible that she just wanted to talk.
"I can save us a little bit of time by filling you in on the situation around here while we ride," she began. We're more or less in Sasakwa now. It used to be a town that sort of serviced the farmers around here. When tenant farming ended abruptly in 1917, and transportation improved, the town sort of fell apart. A few people continued to live in homes or trailers around the area, but the commercial part was deserted. Of course, this was all a long time before any of us were born."
Leo wanted to seem interested, so he asked, "Didn't you just say you were using the City Hall for a prison?"
Jones laughed, "Prison? No, it's just a little rock building that doesn't even have a roof. Our guards have to sit on top of the walls to make sure that the prisoners don't climb out. We just use it for kind of a holding pen. The real jail's over at Konowa, where I live, and where our base is. By the way, be sure you pronounce it 'Kaw-naw-WAH'’ and not 'Kaw-NAW’-wah.' That's what the rich people call it.
'Anyway, Sasakwa --there's only one way to pronounce that ‘Su-SOCK-wah’-- played a real key role in history around here. For that matter, in Oklahoma State history or even beyond that. It was all squelched at the time. I guess you know a lot more about it than I do, about how working people's history gets squelched, but you probably don't know about Sasakwa. Hardly anybody does.
'You can see up ahead of us a kind of a ridge, or I guess you'd just call it a hill, on the right another half mile or so. See it? Doesn't look like much of anything now; it's all covered with scrub timber, blackjack oak like just any old hill around here. But that hill is very special. Very special
'They call it 'Roasting Ear Ridge.' They had an event there on August the first, 1917, that changed everything. The people around here became known, as much as anybody knew about them at all, became known as revolutionaries, even way back then.
'People in Seminole County and two others, Pontotoc and Pottawatamie, had been voting socialist for Eugene Debs. You know about him of course?
Who?
'So they were pretty strong socialists. I think they gave Debs his best vote in the entire nation. And the state of Oklahoma had the largest and best organized Socialist Party in the nation.
'But, in 1916, most of them voted for Woodrow Wilson because he had this slogan 'He kept us out of war.' But he didn't keep us out of war as soon as he got elected. He joined the rush for world conquest by sending troops to Europe. Before he could do that, they had to institute the draft.
'These were peace-loving farmers all around, and a lot of them were Mennonites, real peace lovers. An organization from over in Arkansas called the Working Class Union sent organizers to sign up people to resist the draft. They called President Woodrow Wilson 'Old Slick' and advertised that it was a 'rich man's war and a poor man's fight'--which it was. Just about all the draft-age young tenant farmers around here signed up with them. They held recruiting parties in the schools and churches here and there. When they wanted to talk about it in front of people they weren't sure of, they used a code. They called it 'The Jones Family,' which is what our group of lawful regulators calls itself, too.
Eventually, there was a little shooting over in Konowa and one or two other places, so the men decided to arm themselves and get ready for all - out war against Old Slick. They intended to march on Washington to overthrow the federal government, and they figured there were other groups just like themselves all over the country.
'Come to think of it, there might have been other groups. The historical records don't say so, but most of the historical records don't mention our folks, either."
Leo was finding listening a lot easier than concentrating on staying in the saddle. He was glad that she continued.
"It was getting toward harvest time. Fresh corn could be roasted and eaten right out of the fields, and the cattle were fat. Some of the rebels thought they could eat fresh roasting ears and kill a few steers and march all the way to Washington DC. We call them roasting ears, you might call it green corn; I understand that's what they call freshly picked corn in other places. What little was ever written about our event is always filed under the name "Green Corn Rebellion," but we never called it green corn.
'Anyway, they gathered on this hill right over there on our right. They barbecued a steer and sent out a couple of groups. One of them set fire to the Frisco railroad trestle, but didn't burn it all the way through. Before they were fully gathered, the sheriff's posse was on them. You have to remember that they were all anti-war, and a lot of them were outright pacifists. They never actually fired a shot against their neighbors in the sheriff’s posse. They just scattered.
'For the next several months, just being a male tenant farmer in this part of Oklahoma was dangerous business. People either joined the army or testified against their neighbors or went to jail. There were so many of them jailed that they filled all the jails in the state. Some of them went to Arkansas or Kansas. Some of them were still in federal prison in Kansas in 1921, when the famous socialist Kate Richards O'Hare organized their wives and children to march on Washington. Then they finally got a pardon.
'Going back to August first, though, that was the signal for naked repression against any kind of resistance to the war drive. For the next two years, until the war was over, Oklahoma was ruled by pro-war vigilante gangs that suppressed any dissent. They whipped people, shot people, tarrred and feathered people -- whatever it took to make sure they supported Old Slick and U.S. Imperialism.
'The story was killed at the time by local newspapers on request of the Creel Commission. Creel was a former liberal who was hired by Old Slick to control everybody's information and thinking through the war. All through the war and afterward, the witch-hunt against dissent went on. You might have heard of J. Edgar Hoover? He was a famous witch-hunter who had all kinds of power for decades. He got his start red-baiting, race-baiting, and outright punishing anybody that the government wasn't sure of during and after World War I.
'So, and I guess this is my point, nobody ever found out about the heroes of this area, some of them from right in Sasakwa, who had the courage to stand up and resist imperialist war. They didn't have much of a plan, but they had the courage. This area and the whole tenant-farmer system of Oklahoma never recovered. And the worst is that, until now, almost nobody ever had any idea that it had happened. We're going to build a monument and make sure that the schools teach about Roasting Ear Ridge. Right over there."
Otharine Jones seemed pleased enough just to tell her story. Leo didn't really have to do anything. By the time they reached the Greeley place, he had stopped worrying about falling off the horse and was starting to think about trying to hold his own reins.