For the first 40 years of my life, Oklahoma was a Broadway musical, the film version of which I had seen once, from whence had come the song I sang in every chorus I was ever in regardless of size or affiliation, personal political, or religious, but never a destination.

And then I was there.

I also had never entertained even the whispiest thought of dealing with old, handwritten documents dealing with whaling industry and all the businesses and people in its orbit.

Yet, again, here I am.

Although the two events may not seem to have any relationship, other than me by accident and of no importance, I have found in transcribing old documents that were assumed to be isolated records of individual whaling voyages with no connection to other logbooks or business letters of local companies, that a coincidence may have been missed by others, but, because of something seen by a transcriber, leads to a thread of connections.

The present Edward Gorey House Museum in Yarmouthport, Massachusetts, as the Gorey House, may seem to be just an old house on Cape Cod, but the still existing original section has a connection to New Bedford whaling, the capture of the whaling ship Milo in the North Pacific whaling grounds by the confederate ship Shenendoah months after the Civil War had ended as the captain of the confederate ship had yet to get the news, and a company half a world away writing a letter to the captain of a ship it owned warning of that marauding confederate ship hoping he got it in time but was received by that captain weeks after the marauding and torching of ships had ended. The connection between these unrelated logbooks and business papers may have gone unnoticed had one name involved not been the surname of my grandfather. Other such connections happen often and it is amazing.

Barite roses consist of radial and rosette sprays of disc-shaped barite crystals that contain angular medium quartz and a small quantity of hematite that imparts a reddish color to the “roses”, and were formed during the Permian era when ocean waters covered the western half of Oklahoma and the counties of central Oklahoma were under shallow bays. Over time, barium sulphate precipitated out of seawater and crystallized around grains of quartz sand forming a broad band of the reddish Garber Sandstone as the ocean retreated westward, and a geologic formation of reddish sandstone was left behind.

However, there is the other explanation of why these rose shaped formations are so plentiful in a narrow swath of what used to be called Indian Territory.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 mandated the removal of all American Indian tribes east of the Mississippi River to lands in the West. Ostensibly to protect the Native Americans who had acclimated very well to the lifestyles and practices of the people who had already taken large chunks of their land from those who were still often taking it with violence, the reality was that these Cherokee and other tribes were moved once gold was found on the land some occupied and explains why some Cherokee were not moved and a branch of the tribe still remains East of the Mississippi.

The forced removal was devastating as hundreds of Cherokee died during their trip with thousands dying from the consequences of relocation, and the long forced march has became known as the Trail of Tears. A Cherokee legend says the rocks represent the blood of the braves and the tears of the maidens who made the devastating journey and they formed when the drops of both hit the ground.

I have a few.

Paul Cuffe was an American businessman born in 1759 on Cuttyhunk Island when slavery still existed in the New England colonies. His mother was of the Wampanoag Tribe and his father was a slave freed by his Quaker owner when the Quakers woke up and realized this practice went against core beliefs. He had signed on to a whaling voyage or two as a teenager and during the American Revolution delivered goods to Nantucket by slipping through a British blockade. This experience led to him building a lucrative shipping business along the Atlantic Coast.

As an Abolitionist he became involved in the British effort to found a colony is Sierra Leone where the British had transported more than 1,000 former slaves originally from America travelling to the colony and then England to offered his recommendations to improve the lives of all the people there proposing and then making training, machinery, and ships available to the people to help the colony be successful.

Education was a major concern for Cuffe and it was his insistence that ensured that all schools in Massachusetts were integrated.

Since its early days the Old Dartmouth Historic Society, of which the New Bedford Whaling Museum is its most visible component, has desired to make the whole block upon which the museum sits an educational campus. Whatever reluctance may have existed to the purchase of one end of the block was somewhat removed when the corner lot from the museum to the cross street blew up in a gas main explosion freeing the land for purchase, and upon it now sits the Paul Cuffe Park that honors a very important merchant in the history of the South Coast of Massachusetts and an African/Native American, the embodiment of what he believed all people could be especially African Americans and Native Americans if given the opportunity which is something he endeavored to do.

In transcribing whaling ship crew lists, I had come upon a ship whose first mate was Paul Cuffe’s son. This, of course had me dig deeper and so it was that I was very happy to be at the dedication of the park where a descendent and elder of the family was to speak.

With the Bourne Building of the whaling museum on one side and a commanding view of the harbor on the other, rather than waxing eloquent about all Paul Cuffe’s mercantile and social activities and successes, the head of the family began telling his boyhood experience of having to attend an all-Black school on the army base in Oklahoma to which his father had been stationed in the 1950s while the White kids went to the all-White school to which, although closer to the living quarters than the Black school, they took a school bus while the Black kids had to walk to theirs.

The descendent of the man who ensured schools were integrated in what to the elementary school kid at the time was the universe was being denied an equal education in a public school on a government installation as separate but equal only stressed the separate part.

When I arrived in Oklahoma from Los Angeles, I lost most of what rights I had had as a Gay man.  It was the 1980s and Gay rights were uneven throughout the country, and practically non-existent in some.

As I sat listening, I heard the man recount his loss of rights and this obviously made such profound impression on him, it was that point that meant the most for him at that moment.

My transcription team members and I had been pulled off whatever long-range project we were working on as the museum had just acquired two logbooks from two voyages of Cuffe whaling ships around 1806 and these became a priority. Considering that Paul Cuffe is so easily overlooked in African/American History when he was, as far as business, the country’s first Madam C.J. Walker, having members of the community help with transcribing such historically relevant documents seemed like something worth trying.

In the process of setting up such a thing, I met people with various levels of interest in Paul Cuffe and was invited to the Wampanoag Pow Wow at which descendants of Paul Cuffe would be present.

Thus, I was able to bring a Rose Rock from my collection of Oklahoma things and give it to a member the family, explaining the legend of the rock to him, the connection between it, Oklahoma, and the person who turned out to be his uncle and the historian of the family, and that I thought the member of an East Coast tribe who had spent time in Oklahoma, as I had done, and who had experienced a loss of rights in his case won by his ancestor and in mine by contemporaries, might like to have something from there with a Native American connection.

So in the historical home of the Paul Cuffe of Ashanti and Wampanoag parentage, a rose rock from Oklahoma could end up sitting as a small connection to Tribes out west and to memories a member of an East Coast tribe who spent time there and experienced what his ancestor had never wanted him to.

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