April 2008 Times

                                                   One
Most of Claud Johnson’s earliest memories, from the mid-1940s, are of his father, Robinson Johnson. In one, his father, a large and powerful man, nestles his 4-year-old son close while telling him stories about “our people.” Robinson spoke to Claud mainly in English, but sometimes in his first language, Chickasaw. To this day, Claud says he can remember fragments of some of the stories, and these are especially precious to him.

 In another memory, he is a little boy sitting in a cotton or peanut field protected by the family’s German Shepherd, while his father and mother work nearby, all day every day, picking the crop. When the dog died years later, Claud took it hard. He was closer to that dog than anyone else in his life.

In a third set of memories, which Claud has fused into one, he sees and hears his father coming home drunk, transformed into a strange, unpredictable man. And there is one remembrance that was especially confusing and scary to him. His mother, Effie, takes him to visit his father in the Stratford, Oklahoma, jail. Why can’t he come home with us, the child wants to know. Effie doesn’t answer.

Claud also recounts seeing his father lift up and move an outhouse. Then, he quickly adds that he didn’t actually see this, only heard about it. He did see what was said to be the aftermath: his father, lying in bed throughout the night, restless with pain, bathed in sweat.

 For years, Claud associated this terrible memory with the story about the outhouse. Later, he understood that his father’s appendix had ruptured. He recalls bits and pieces of images of racing to get the huge, but by-then, helpless and soon-to-be lifeless man to the hospital.

 “I remember at my dad’s funeral,” Claud says, “there was an overflow crowd at Criswell’s [funeral home] in Ada. And, there was a second service at High Heel Church, where my grandfather Elum Johnson had been pastor. It was overflow there, too. I remember people getting up one by one and speaking in Chickasaw about my father. He might have been a poor, uneducated laborer, but he also had stature and was a well respected member of the Chickasaw community. Knowing that has been worth a lot to me.”

                                                    Two                              
 In 1948, when Claud was 7, he learned about bigotry first-hand--and that his mother and step-dad would not stand up for him. On his first day of school, at the McGee school north of Stratford, the teacher told him--the only Native American in the class--to sit at the back of the room and leave the white children alone. On his way home, four older boys taunted and then beat him. “I thought, if this is being Indian, I don’t want to be no Indian,” he recalls.

  Claud says his mother and step-dad, Sam Carney, ignored his pleas for intervention. In fact, Carney scarcely acknowledged the boy’s existence. Sam made so little money that he was dispatched often by Effie to hunt rabbits with a .22 to put food on the table. Some days there was nothing to eat.

Somehow, Claud made it through the school year. But when he showed up for his first day of the second grade, he was told that he had failed first grade. The teacher told him to go home, that he wasn’t wanted there.

After a year at a school near Yeager with a teacher who treated him “like a human being,” the family moved near Center, where the boy was faced with another teacher who “hated Indians.” On the first day, this teacher told the boy that he spelled his name Claud incorrectly. “When I said there is no ‘e’ at the end, he made me stand at the chalkboard and write my name over and over the ‘correct’ way.

Such bigoted attacks were part of Claud’s early schooling. Although he adapted to get by, he occasionally rebelled by speaking Chickasaw in class—an offense he knew would get him a whipping.

Despite the humiliating obstacles in his path, Claud says he always liked learning and studying. Then, in high school, he had a teacher, Bessie Hatchett, who recognized his good qualities and encouraged him not just to hang in there but excel. Motivated, he wanted to show at least Mrs. Hatchett that he could do well. However, other teachers wanted to run him off. Sometimes, he got whippings for offenses that were not even specified.

Basketball was his refuge in the ninth grade. Big and tall like his father, he led Vanoss to a conference championship in the late 1950s, and was elected the school’s freshman Basketball King. For the ceremony, he was required to wear a sport’s coat and slacks, clothing he didn’t own. Despite the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ money that Effie received to help raise her son, she refused to purchase the needed clothing. Claud says he got work and bought himself a white sport’s coat and pants. He later learned that he had inherited some cattle and horses from his grandfather. But this potential windfall also eluded the boy. He says Effie sold the animals and kept the money.

“I got to feeling like I was in a battle I couldn’t win,” Claud recalls. “Both at home and in school.”  So, he quit school, and as a response to the sale of his horses and cattle, convinced two other boys to help him steal two calves to take to the sale barn in Holdenville. The three were caught and arrested. The parents of the other boys got them released that day. But, Effie told the police to just keep Claud in jail. He says he spent four months in the Pontotoc County jail before his half-brother arrived and took him back to Kansas to live with him.

Despite Claud’s anger, bitterness, poverty and lack of prospects, he says he had hope for a better life. He got married in 1962 in Kansas and he and Fern Johnson had two children. But he says her family never accepted Fern marrying an Indian, which eventually wrecked the marriage. Claud rebounded with another woman, Barbara White of Dodge City, Kansas, who bore his third and fourth children.

So by the mid-1960s, Claud had four children, but lacked the means to support them adequately. He worked, much as his father had, as a day laborer. Sometimes he was obliged to drive hundreds of miles to find good work. He was working on a dam in Del Rio, Texas, when he tore up a knee and returned to Ada in 1966.
       
                                                         
                                                            Three
Claud met Floyd Mills, 32, in an Ada bar on April 25, 1966. Like Claud, Mills was a casual laborer. He had a wife and two children. They lived in Atoka, but Mills was in Ada looking for work. Claud told him he was about to return to a high-paying construction job working on a dam in Del Rio, Texas. Mills asked if he could go along, and after a few beers, persuaded Claud to accompany him to Del Rio starting that very night. After Claud assured Mills he had enough gas money to get them there, they drove to Effie’s house near Center so that Claud could get his belongings.

 Walking between the car and house, Claud says that Mills suddenly pulled a knife and demanded his money. Claud whipped out a .22 pistol and shot Mills in the leg. Mills dropped to his knees, and then a second shot dropped him for good. Johnson moved the body away from his mother’s house and then drove to Del Rio, where he was later apprehended and returned to Ada to stand trial for murder.

 Johnson pled not guilty. His court-appointed attorney, Barney Ward, told him he believed his client was innocent. But apparently Ward told others that Johnson was guilty. Ward may have believed the latter because he called no witnesses for the defense, including Johnson, even after the coroner testified that Mills had been shot with two different guns. Claud didn’t fail to notice that the jury was all white. They took about two hours to find him guilty and sentence him to life imprisonment. He was 25 years old. In prison at McAlester, he soon was notified that Fern had filed for divorce. He says he received no visitors or letters for seven years, and in his resigned “to my fate” mindset, didn’t want any.

                                                             Four
 After 11 years, Claud was paroled. He got a job with Chickasaw Industries and worked on the construction of the new Carl Albert Hospital in Ada. He mentions a well-known photo of Governor Overton James at the groundbreaking ceremony, wearing a hardhat and sitting on a bulldozer. Claud says he was just out of the frame telling Gov. James what levers to pull.

Despite what he had told the parole board, the 36-year-old was still not prepared to deal with life’s obstacles on the outside. When his overture to “play a role” in the lives of his children was rebuffed, he married a second time, knew almost immediately it was a mistake and took off for the mountains of New Mexico, which he knew would get his parole revoked. He was caught and returned to prison.

By 1980, he was in a prison release program that enabled him to work outside, and strange as it may seem, own and drive a car. One day he drove that car to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where he secured a good-paying construction job.  He then drove to Montana, worked there awhile and then drove to Arizona, a state with sights he had always wanted to see. When he had seen them, he called the law in Oklahoma and told them where he’d be. “I just didn’t like being a fugitive,” Claud says.

Back in prison, Claud’s luck and life changed in 1985. Older (now 44) and wiser, he sought out tribal elders, both inmates and visitors, for advice and counsel. One visting elder’s words had a profound effect on him: “You only make this journey once, and any good you can do along the way, you should.” The elder was Jack Thorpe, the son of legendary athlete Jim Thorpe.

Why was this simple advice so important to him? Maybe it was because his life was simultaneously changing in another way that complemented and enriched his new thinking. A fellow Native American inmate, who had served his time, gave his art supplies to Claud, who had wondered if might have artistic talent. He was amazed to discover that he did. His paintings, leatherwork and beadwork were judged to be excellent, especially for a beginner. He considered discovering this latent talent to be a very positive sign from the spirit world.

 Claud combined his passion for making art involving Indian themes or subjects with memories of Chickasaw stories from his relatives and even fragments from his long-dead father, Robinson Johnson. Soon, some of his paintings were being sold at the prison gift shop and he was selected to paint two large murals at the prison rodeo grounds in McAlester. His attitude and well-being improved markedly, and he was living a more spiritual life with the help of other elders. He thought if he could convey these positive factors persuasively to the parole board, he might earn another shot at redemption outside the prison walls.

                                                             Five
 When Claud was transferred  in 1994 to the Joseph Harp Correctional Center in Lexington, OK, he assumed a leadership position in the Confined Inter-Tribal Group. They meet once a week to pray and chant accompanied by a drum made for them by Chickasaw-Seminole Tim Harjo. Every other week, they have a sweat lodge ceremony. Just as importantly, they plan activities to support one another and hold seminars for visiting at-risk Indian youth.

Students from the Chickasaw Nation’s Carter Seminary came once a few years ago, says Claud. “We’ve helped many young inmates, some who were cold and hard, learn their traditional ways and straighten themselves out. We’ve also gotten through to some confused, troubled young boys who in time would have wound up here. “It’s a great feeling to know that we’ve helped some of these Indian kids. We level with them about what it’s like in here and I pass along traditional tribal knowledge and stories that I learned from Chickasaws like a medicine woman who my uncle took me to meet when I was 14.

He also began corresponding and meeting with pen pal Norma Cafky. They fell in love and were married in 1988. This coincided with the death of his mother, Effie. As a result, Claud finally felt free to tell Norma the truth about the death of Floyd Mills back in 1966.

Late that night, after Claud shot Mills in the leg, Effie ran out on the porch, and thinking Claud had been shot, fired a single shot from her .25 pistol at Mills. He was struck in the neck and died almost immediately. Claud yelled at his mother that she had always been wanting to kill someone, and “now you’ve done it!” Nevertheless, he hid the body and disposed of Effie’s .25. Before the trial, Claud decided, in effect, to take the rap for his mother by telling her to keep quiet and the attorney not to let her testify. Still, she could have told authorities the truth. But when she didn’t, that left Claud as the only suspect because he was the last person seen with Mills before he died.

If Norma doubted the story, she cleared it up, at Claud’s suggestion, by going to visit Bessie Hatchett, the teacher who had befriended and encouraged Claud. Mrs. Hatchett told Norma that Effie--shortly before her death--had admitted killing Mills because she thought Claud had been wounded. Norma arranged for Claud’s old lawyer, Barney Ward, to obtain a written deposition from Mrs. Hatchett, dated March 22, 1990.

Years later, after Norma reluctantly divorced Claud at her family’s insistence, she obtained a written statement from Barbara White (the mother of Claud’s two youngest children). She wrote that Effie had told her that she had killed the man to protect Claud, who “was taking the blame for it.”

These sworn statements and letters of recommendation for parole have been placed in Claud’s file. One of the letters was written by Rick Ewing, his councilor at Joseph Harp during the past five years. Ewing says Claud is no longer a threat to anyone, if he ever was. Furthermore, he admires and respects the work Claud has accomplished for Native people one-on-one and through the Confined Inter-Tribal Group. In fact, the prison awarded him a “certificate of appreciation” last January for his long-time dedicated service to the CITG.

Such support has garnered a positive vote for Claud from the Parole Board in recent years, but no governor has been willing to sign the paper. Ewing says Oklahoma is one of a small and dwindling number of states to still require the governor’s signature for a parole. “Signing paroles in Oklahoma is not politically advantageous, but denying them is,” says Ewing.

 Within the past year, Claud learned that his borderline diabetes has tipped the wrong way and the poor circulation in his legs makes walking painful and precarious. He realizes he may die in prison, but still hopes to be freed to spend whatever time he has left getting better acquainted with family and persuading Native Americans to say “no more” to alcohol and drugs and to walk what he calls “the red path of our traditional ways.”

Claud believes the Creator puts everyone on earth for a reason. He has struggled more than most to find his reason. But more than 20 years ago, elders directed him to the red path, and he has felt obliged to help those who are lost and those who are still searching.

                                             The End