Jim Bob Pearson

There is a particular quality to Oklahoma dirt that gets into everything—your clothes, your hair, the very foundation of who you become. I learned this truth in the 1950s, born on the edge where Main Street Enid met wheat fields that stretched toward horizons I couldn't yet imagine reaching.

My family's Oklahoma story is built on layers of dirt—some natural, some brought in to cover what came before. My grandmother Eva was half Cherokee. She came to Oklahoma before statehood, when they still called it IT for Indian Territory. Her father, Winfield McLaren, worked in what she said was one of the first oil wells drilled in Oklahoma, drilling through earth that had belonged to her people before it belonged to oil companies.

When we asked her directly—my brothers and me—she answered with words I'll never forget: "Yes, but I don't want anyone to know that I am an Indian." That shame meant no one in our family, not even my father, could sign up for the Dawes Commission Indian rolls. She denied us our heritage, our legal claim to Cherokee identity, our connection to land that ran deeper than any homestead claim. She chose invisibility over identity, and that choice echoed through generations.

My earliest education came from earth itself. After summer rains, my brother Billy Guy and I would run through wheat fields, splashing in puddles that appeared like miracles. We found tadpoles swimming there—creatures that could only swim, somehow arrived in water that hadn't existed hours before. Standing with wet feet and muddy hands, trying to solve that puzzle, something shifted in me. A switch flipped. The wheat field and those tadpoles started me thinking in ways I haven't stopped since—about transformation, about how life persists in harsh places, about mysteries hidden in ordinary Oklahoma dirt.

By the mid-sixties, my family moved to Norman so my father could work for the University of Oklahoma. We lived in the old base commander's house on what had been a navy base, surrounded by evergreens at the southern edge of town. Beyond us lay only State Highway 9 and the Canadian River with its stretches of sand where we rode dirt bikes, feeling the grit in our teeth and the freedom in our chests.

The move to Oklahoma City during high school completed my education in transformation. My father bought a house in southeast Oklahoma City, in what had been called Bodine City, built on an old oil patch. Behind our house, woods held abandoned rigs—concrete foundations pushed over, oil field trash scattered like archaeological evidence of boom and bust. We rode dirt bikes through those woods, weaving between rusted equipment and crumbling concrete, and I learned that Oklahoma was always being torn up and remade, always transforming while somehow remaining fundamentally itself.

I'm the grandson of Grandma Eva, who carried her Cherokee heritage like a shameful secret. Her father drilled some of the first oil wells in Indian Territory, pulled black gold from earth that belonged to his daughter by blood and treaty, and watched as that territory became Oklahoma and his daughter became white by choice. That shame—that willingness to erase yourself to survive—taught me something profound about the cost of belonging. About what we sacrifice to fit into places that should have been ours without question.

I'm Oklahoma-made, dirt-raised, shaped by this place in ways I'm still discovering with each story I write. But I'm also shaped by stories not told, by heritage denied, by the grandmother who belonged to this land in ways my wheat-farming ancestors never could but who died pretending that belonging didn't exist. Her words—"Yes, but I don't want anyone to know that I am an Indian"—are as much a part of my inheritance as the dirt under my fingernails.

I write from a house built in 1985 in the same woods where I rode dirt bikes as a teenager, where the Bodine City oil field once operated behind my father's house. They brought in new dirt to cover the old field before they built here—literally buried the oil patch under fresh earth. But I know what's underneath. I remember the woods before they were sanitized, remember learning that Oklahoma is always covering up one version of itself to make room for the next.

I live on top of history that's been deliberately buried, in a house built on dirt trucked in to hide what this place used to be. It's a perfect metaphor for everything I write about—the layers we add to make the past acceptable, the new surfaces we create to cover old wounds, the way we keep building on contaminated ground and pretending it's clean.

The trilogy that begins with *DIRT* is my attempt to honor people who taught me that survival isn't about avoiding hardship but about what you become while enduring it. It's about choices we make when all options are difficult, about faith maintained when faith seems irrational, about love that persists despite every reason to give up. And it's about stories we bury—Grandma Eva who said "I am an Indian" but forbade anyone from knowing it, the complicated truth that Oklahoma land was stolen before it was given away, that some of us belonged here before others claimed it, and that shame passes down through generations as surely as land or Bibles or family names. It's about the dirt we bring in to cover the dirt we don't want to see, and how buried truth keeps seeping up through the layers no matter how thick we make them.

This is what I know: that dirt remembers even when we forget, that stories buried under new earth keep seeping up through the layers, that my grandmother's shame about being Cherokee is part of the Oklahoma story as surely as the Dust Bowl or the oil boom. I know you can bring in fresh dirt to cover an old oil field, but what's underneath doesn't disappear—it just waits, patient as bedrock, until someone digs deep enough to find it.

*Jim Bob Pearson writes from Oklahoma City, in a house built on covered ground, where buried truths keep surfacing despite our best efforts to hide them, and where the silences left by untold stories speak just as loudly as the words on the page.*