The Best American Travel Writing 2012 (24 page)

Whether or not there is prejudice at work in the Holy City Easter pageant, the fact remains that while this place and this play once expressed a deeply sensed and widely shared worldview, each year it draws fewer and fewer participants and observers. All through World War II, attendance for the pageant still neared a hundred thousand. The Easter after the war ended, in 1946, the audience actually neared two hundred thousand, according to the
Daily Oklahoman
and the
Lawton Constitution.

The Lawton Story,
a movie version of the pageant, was even produced by Kroger Babb, the godfather of exploitation film, a genre which was, according to Felicia Feaster and Bret Wood in
Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Film,
“a bizarre mixture of . . . saccharine morality tales interrupted by moments of raw, ugly truth.” Babb's 1944 film,
Mom and Dad,
for example, follows the story of a young woman charmed into sex by a dashing pilot. After the pilot dies in a plane crash, she finds herself unexpectedly pregnant.
The Story of a Birth,
a movie within the movie of
Mom and Dad,
then presents detailed drawings of the female reproductive system followed by a graphic documentary of a woman giving birth, first vaginally, then by cesarean section. Given Babb's background with
Mom and Dad,
perhaps it's not so strange that he would produce
The Lawton Story,
which contains its own embedded nativity scene. The film premiered on Friday, April 1, 1949, in Lawton. President Harry Truman and his wife, Bess, were invited, though they did not attend.
The Lawton Story,
later recut and retitled
The Prince of Peace
after a dismal critical reception, is about a six-year-old girl, played by the relentlessly cheerful Ginger Prince, who persuades her great-uncle, a heartless banker, to see the performance of the Holy City passion play, after which, of course, he changes his greedy and iniquitous ways. Inside this frame story is lengthy footage from a daytime reenactment of the actual Holy City pageant.

The Lawton Story
may have been the high point. In the 1950s the Holy City Easter pageant began to see a slow but steady decline. Now, in a good year, the audience might number a couple of thousand. The cast has also shrunk—to two hundred or so, “including animals,” Anita Brockwell said. Brockwell, Burgher, Matthys—they have all mourned this falling-off, as well as the waning participation in the passion play. They blame television and other creature comforts, soccer games and T-ball practice and ballet, the laziness and greed of youth. As the older generation dies, the young people are not coming up to replace them. “It's the trend of the whole world—the change in times,” Matthys told me. “I'd like to see that hillside covered again. But it'll never be.”

 

In 1882 the Wichita Indians were removed from their village on the north fork of the Red River to a reservation 25 miles east of Fort Sill. From there the Wichita Mountains were just barely in sight. In 1900 reservation lands that had been held in common during the intervening eighteen years were divided into allotments of 160 acres per person, with the remainder declared “surplus lands” and opened up to non-Indian settlement. The Wichita elders knew the end was approaching because their ancient stories foretold the time of Dakawaitsakakide, “When Everything Begins to Run Out.” They knew that the things which they had needed and which had been given to them in dreams would disappear. That children of the same families would intermarry and cease to have offspring, or that they would birth not human children but animals. Then the animals, even the flowing water, would begin to speak to men. The morning star and the moon would be human again, and the man who had been chasing the deer he'd shot, an act that had set the universe in motion, would finally overtake it and recover his arrow. “Furthering this belief [in the coming end],” writes George Dorsey, who recorded the stories of the Wichita in 1904, “is the frequency with which the people in their dreams converse with stars.”

Medicine Bluff for the Plains Indians, the Holy City of the Wichitas for generations of Lawtonians, the Holy City of Jerusalem for Christians and Muslims and Jews—why do we need these omphali, visible and tangible manifestations of the longed-for and imagined? Is it because, as all the old mythologies say in one way or another, we've been split umbilically from the divine? The cord's been cut, we've been cast out from our native land, and we yearn to reclaim that place where we can be connected again, however briefly, to what we no longer possess. We're all exiles, longing for home.

In Genesis, which begins the Bible, we have what scholars believe are some of the oldest references to the place that became the actual Jerusalem; Revelation, and thus the Bible, ends with John's inspired and imaginative vision of the otherworldly New Jerusalem, to which those who believe will one day return. “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea,” begins chapter 21. “And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” Then, from “a great and high mountain,” an angel shows John this New Jerusalem of precious stones—jasper, sapphire, emerald, topaz, amethyst. The streets are gold, the gates are pearl, the river of the water of life clear as crystal. Growing in the center, the tree of life, laden with fruit.

Saint Augustine saw human existence as a kind of exile from the divine, and the journey of the soul as a pilgrimage to God. In
On Christian Doctrine,
he describes a world permeated with signs which we must learn to read so that we can use them to reach God, who is our home. “Thus in this mortal life, wandering from God,” he declares, “if we wish to return to our native country where we can be blessed, we should use this world and not enjoy it, so that the ‘invisible things' of God ‘being understood by the things that are made' may be seen, that is, so that by means of corporal and temporal things we may comprehend the eternal and spiritual.” That last bit—
so that by means of corporal and temporal things we may comprehend the eternal and spiritual
—is what Jerusalem, both the real one, with its Calvary Mount and Stone of Unction and empty tomb, and the Holy City of the Wichitas, with its earnest facsimiles, tries to give those who come, seeking their spiritual homeland: a passing connection, through the things that are made, with the divine.

 

That April I convinced Terry to leave the girls with their grandparents and drive back up to Oklahoma so we could witness for ourselves the country's longest continuously run outdoor passion play. We arrived in Lawton late in the afternoon on Saturday and checked into the Best Western near the Comanche Nation Casino and Smoke Shop along the highway, then drove out to the Holy City. The sky was overcast and a cold, damp wind had begun to blow. In the refuge, low-lying wildflowers were starting to show though the russet winter grasses. Above us, hawks circled as if on pendulum strings.

When we arrived at the Holy City, the Christ of the Wichitas welcomed us with his open arms and the Gloryland Band was singing old-time gospel music out of a shiny blue trailer in the parking lot. Terry and I wandered into the gift shop—run by the nonprofit Wallock Foundation—to get presents for the girls in order to assuage our guilt over leaving them. Inside, we found Holy City spoons and thimbles and embroidered patches; Indian dream-catchers; snow globes with Native warriors on horseback; granite chips from the Holy City in small glass vials; bookmarks with cheerful, upbeat religious messages on them:
Prayer is a deposit in heaven,
read one.
Even on the darkest day, His light shines through to show the way
, read another.

Outside, the wind had picked up and there was a light mist. Silhouettes of cypress trees rose up against the gray sky. Behind the gift shop, concealed from view, were the riding club's trailers. Horses stood outside them, their red Roman blankets trimmed in gold and thrown casually over their backs like dressing gowns. The disciples of Jesus flirted with the girls of Jerusalem. Angels in white robes and wings walked among us along the stony ground.

I confess that we spent nearly the entire pageant inside our station wagon, drinking coffee and eating peanut M&Ms, trying to keep warm. The temperature had dropped into the low forties after the sun went down, and the wind across the open valley was piercing. We'd brought along a quilt, which we awkwardly wrapped around ourselves. Terry fell asleep. From time to time I would leave the car and nestle myself into the red stones, trying to find a spot protected from the wind where I could watch the pageant. From the loudspeaker across the hills, the disembodied voices of the narrators carried the story, and the actors gesticulated to the words while floodlights illuminated one scene after another and then went dark. It was all just as Richard Matthys had told me it would be—the blue neon star over the stable, the Magi leading the camels, Mary and Joseph and the real baby Jesus, who had come, as all infants do, to save the world. “Glory to God in the highest,” the narrator with the voice of the Lord reminded the shepherds, and the choir sang “Angels We Have Heard on High” as the hills lit up the angels of the Wichitas, who had been lodging unseen in the rocks all along but now were visible to everyone, for there is nothing covered that shall not one day be revealed. There were the miracles too—the wedding at Cana, the cripple healed—which told us that if we asked, we would receive, and if we sought, we would find. There was the woman saved from stoning. Later, when Jesus made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem and upset the tables of the money changers, the high priest, perhaps sensing some new dispensation, proclaimed that this man from Nazareth had simply gone too far. Then Judas betrayed the Lord for thirty pieces of silver, and Pilate washed his hands of the whole affair. On the rooftop of the temple that would soon be destroyed, all except for the Western Wall, the risen Jesus appeared to poor doubting Thomas. “Blessed are those,” the narrator intoned, “who haven't seen and who believe.”

 

Just before the pageant had begun, while Terry was getting hot dogs for us at the concession stand, I'd gone into the Holy City's World Chapel. Here, beginning in 1940, Irene Malcolm, a local portrait artist and WPA muralist, spent nearly a decade of her life, unpaid, creating ceiling and wall murals and carving the wooden pews. In “The Impish Angel of the Wichitas,” a 1952 article from the
Daily Oklahoman,
Malcolm is called a disciple of Reverend Wallock, and her work “an embodiment of the dreams he bared to her.”

But this work seems utterly her own. In the vestibule, the walls are covered with tiles she shaped and fired from native clay, their green glaze the color of cedar needles. Sculpted into those tiles, which number nearly four thousand, is the Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi. “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy Peace,” it begins. “There is so much selfishness,” Malcolm explained to the reporter. “I was searching for something to combat it and found this.” Inside the chapel proper, a mural of Gabriel blowing a trumpet covers the entire ceiling. Behind the lectern, two other angels hold a painted scroll of the Lord's Prayer. Old iron sconces line the white plaster walls. Between them hang portraits of the disciples, also done by Malcolm. Even Judas Iscariot is here. “I painted Judas as a weak character, not as a wicked one,” Malcolm told the
Daily Oklahoman,
a little subversively. “Judas was almost as bad as the rest of us.”

I decided that my favorite works of Malcolm's were the two murals on either side of the pulpit: the Crucifixion scene and the Resurrection. The Wichita Mountains supply the background for both paintings. In the foreground of each, there is no Christ on the cross, no Savior dressed in white. Instead you see only the feet of Jesus: in the one, they are bloodied, the nail driven through; in the other, they are free of wounds, lifting into the air. Around his feet the faithful stare wide-eyed, unbelieving. Dashing past the Crucifixion is Malcolm's white dog, Emily, seemingly chasing some creature that has caught her attention, not at all aware of the man who happens to be nailed to the cross. She's completely missed the sign. In that newspaper article, Malcolm, seated for a photo on the top steps of a ladder near Gabriel, in the fleecy clouds, said, “Up here in Heaven, it's not as nice a place as they said it was.”

Malcolm on the ladder, looking down upon her earthly homeland, recalls the Wichita myth of “the Woman Who Married a Star,” which George Dorsey recorded more than a century ago, as the Native people of the region began more and more in their dreams to converse with the stars, and the world of the Wichitas seemed to be coming to an end. A woman was watching the night sky, the story goes. She imagined that the stars might once have been people, dim stars the old ones, bright stars the young. There was an especially brilliant star that she was sure must have been a fine-looking young man and she wished to have him for her husband. That night she dreamed she was with the man who had been a star, and when she woke, she was sitting by a fire with an old man. She had been mistaken. He was the star she had seen from the earth and he claimed her for his wife. Time passed. There was a large rock which the man forbade her to move. But one day she disobeyed, and when she moved the rock, she could see the earth down below, through the chasm. Longing for her home, she made a rope of soapweed bunches braided together and climbed down to her native country, the land that had borne her.

When we'd come here with our daughters, in February, before the long drive back home to Houston we'd taken them out to the refuge to show them the buffalo and the place we used to hike when Terry was stationed at Fort Sill. Back then we would often head to an area called Charon Gardens, which the guidebook describes as “an untamed garden of Eden, a pristine, primeval wilderness.” There, massive oval boulders of red granite balance precariously on ridges, and a sheer cliff drops down to a pool of deep water. But that wintry day we stood with our daughters at the edge of the precipice and looked out upon everything from a great and high mountain and beheld that it was very good. Above us was blue sky. Below, the cold dark water. Like angels, we hovered somewhere in between.