Leaving Pontotoc County: The Odyssey of Two Young Women in World War II

Leaving Pontotoc County is the story of two young wives whose world is turned upside down following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Like every other young woman of their generation, they must constantly face the real possibility that America will lose the War and their husbands will never return. In the face of such adversity, they attempt to establish an independent life for themselves that they never dreamed possible. Along the way, they encounter love triangles, severe rationing of every commodity imaginable, film noir, Greek Mythology, the legacy of the 1921 Ku Klux Klan massacre in Tulsa, loss of faith, and the horrors of the Dachau concentration camp.

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Frequent Questions Raised About Leaving Pontotoc County

1. Far and away the most frequent inquiry I’ve received about Leaving Pontotoc County involves the issue of race relations during World War II.

The untold stories of World War II are the dramatic gender and race changes it produced in American society. Even insofar as you can find material covering these changes, the sources are mostly in dry social science statistical analyses. In fact, however, these were earth-shattering, and often gut-wrenching, moments for the women and minorities who lived through them.

At the start of World War II, American institutions were largely run by and for White men. To win the War, though, America needed everyone’s participation. Children bought War bonds and collected scrap metal. Women, who had previously been confined to the bleachers, or at best to the sidelines, were asked to suit up and take the field of American commerce.

And, as the War progressed, American society likewise became more integrated. But the roots of racial discrimination had been sunk deeply into American culture—and changing that culture certainly did not happen overnight. In order to fix problems that originated with the country’s founding, and that continue to this day, it is critical to understand our history. As the philosopher George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Leaving Pontotoc County is my attempt to help us remember our past.

I grew up in the shadow of my father, who was a towering figure among historical scholars of Native Americans. My childhood afforded me a deep understanding of the sour legacy of America’s Manifest Destiny—the view of the world that seeks to justify America’s murder and mistreatment of Indigenous peoples, many of whom came to be warehoused in Oklahoma. One only need visit a Reservation anywhere in America today to see how their mistreatment continues.

The Japanese launched a horrible and unjustified attack at Pearl Harbor that led to America’s entry into World War II. But months after that attack, the federal government set up internment camps for our citizens of Japanese extraction. This was done despite the fact that every U.S. intelligence agency recommended against doing so because the government had already apprehended every single Japanese inhabitant who might have posed a threat to the United States. Still, the federal government cratered to public pressure from such liberal stalwarts as California’s governor (and later United States Supreme Court Chief Justice) Earl Warren by interning Japanese-Americans. It is noteworthy that there were no similar internments of American citizens with German, Italian, Austrian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, or Romanian descent—yet all hailed from countries which had likewise declared war on America.

Thousands of Latino-Americans were viciously attacked in the Zoot Suit riots that took place in Los Angeles during the War. Most of the perpetrators of those riots were White Marines and Sailors who happened to be stationed there.

As for African-Americans, while no one disputes that they were enslaved in America before the Civil War, once one moves past 1865, there is considerable confusion and misinformation about what life was like for our African-American citizens. Nowhere is this more notable than in Oklahoma, which enacted thoroughly racist laws once it was admitted to the Union in 1907. And yet, despite the best efforts of Oklahoma’s White leaders to suppress African-American success from the time of Statehood, a thriving enclave of African-American prosperity arose in the Greenwood District of Tulsa. But in 1921, the Ku Klux Klan annihilated Greenwood’s residents and burned the entire community to the ground. Incredibly, for decades afterward, Oklahoma’s history books failed even to mention this tragedy. Because the legacy of that massacre extended into World War II (and actully extends into the present day), it is important to memorialize, not only the event itself, but, through one of the primary characters in Leaving Pontotoc County, the incomprehensible pain suffered by the Greenwood community.

2. A large number of readers of Leaving Pontotoc County indicated they were captivated by the amount of ink devoted to cinema, and wondered why that is.

As America was emerging from the Depression in the late 1930s, literacy was incredibly high. In fact, less than one in two Americans age 25 and older earned a high school diploma. But there was one place where literacy was not required: the cinema. At the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, fully 50 percent of the country’s population was going to the movies every week. And, after Pearl Harbor, movie attendance actually increased to over 60 percent. Nothing on this scale has been seen since. As I have noted in my Author’s Blog, “historical fiction is best, not when it projects the mindset of current culture backwards, but rather when it endows characters with the hopes and dreams, as well as the biases and prejudices, that were prevalent at the time they lived.” Because cinema was as central to Americans in the 1940s as television and social media are today, it was important to highlight it in Leaving Pontotoc County. But above and beyond its centrality, my own view is that film-making reached it very apex in the period that began in 1935 (with Alfred Hitchcock’s 39 Steps) and ended in 1959 (with Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder)—an argument that is partially conveyed through the considerable intellect and cinematic vision of one of the heroines of Leaving Pontotoc County.

About the Cover Artist

The stunningly dramatic original cover art and book design for both The Broomcorn Field and Leaving Pontotoc County were painted by Anna Hazel, an artist in Houston, Texas, who may be visited on her Instagram page: @anna_hazel_does_art or contacted at annahazel@gmail.com.

Press

July 29, 2021: OU alumnus releases historical fiction novel exploring hardships faced by women, ethnic groups during WWII