Fiction writers mine their own experiences and those of other people. When I began writing, I was shy about appropriating other people’s stories and I asked my old roommate if I could use the incident that made her a young widow, a small plane crash over the Mojave Desert.
I needn’t have borrowed other people’s stories. I have my own rich family history to draw from. No would-be novelist could fail to recognize the dramatic possibilities in my mother’s side of the family. One of the first scenes I ever wrote was so vivid in my mind that it could have been true. It’s a scene of a small child playing in the dirt when a car containing the mother she has never known comes tearing along the dusty road. The mother leaps from the car and rushes forward to plant a lipstick kiss on the little girl’s forehead. The woman is driven off by the grandfather and the next morning the little girl thinks it was all a dream. Two decades passed from the time this story appeared on the screen of my first word processor (remember those?) until it came out in paperback earlier this year. Here’s the real story behind Oklahoma Air.
My maternal grandmother, Carrie Ecil, was born in rural Arkansas in 1905. Her family moved to southeastern Oklahoma when she was thirteen. She married and had her first child at age twenty and was divorced within five years. When she remarried in 1928, she was pregnant, but not with her new husband’s child. This only became apparent when my mother was born. She was clearly a Native American child. Carrie Ecil and newborn were sent back to Pushmataha County and soon after she launched an affair with a new man and bore a third child, another daughter. The identity of Aunt Helen’s father would remain a mystery until he revealed himself decades later. Whether or not he was a Baptist preacher, I made him so in Oklahoma Air. These two sisters were emotionally close but very different in appearance and personality. My aunt Helen was a blue-eyed blond who married a missionary and lived a quiet life as wife and mother. My mother had black hair, an olive complexion, and was often described as the most beautiful woman in Antlers. She had a career as an optician, and she raised hell from first breath to last.
Within two years of being rejected by her husband’s family, my grandmother became a widow, now with three children, all by different fathers. She married a third time and bore yet another daughter, my aunt Anna Maude. Marriage seems not to have suited my grandmother. She left all four little girls down on the farm to be raised by my sainted great-grandmother and headed west. There are photos of Carrie Ecil in a WAAC (Women’s Army Air Corp) uniform. She once sent me materials to help me become a singer-songwriter like she claimed to be. She married one last time and settled in Denver, Colorado and sent for her youngest child. The others were all married by then.
Either mother or grandmother, if written true, I felt, would strain credulity. I rolled them into “Reen” and imagined what would happen if, rather than four daughters, there was a daughter and a son. And they were raised not by the same relative, but different ones. And it was all a big dark secret.
I hope you’ll give Oklahoma Air a try.
