Wewoka, Oklahoma - An Extraordinary Family Comes Home

Our trip has taken us the center of the nation to visit a family with whom we have a special bond: the Overstreets. Roy and Pauline Overstreet (nee Jones) were our friends and neighbors for many years in Montlake. Roy worked for NOAA as a physical oceanographer, and Pauline became a nurse supervisor in rehab medicine at the old Providence

The Overstreets brought an unusual personal history to our Seattle enclave. Their roots were in the thin red soil of rural Oklahoma; they started out as children of farmers who scratched out a livliehood in one of the poorest parts of the nation. The center of their physical universe was Wewoka, a town founded by the Black Seminoles after their forcible deportation from the deep south to central Oklahoma. The Seminole and Creek Indians had a complex and inter-twined relationship with the slaves of the south. The Trail of Tears, during which thousands of the deportees died after being expelled from their ancestral lands, ended largely in central Oklahoma.

Roy and Pauline’s ancestors were refugees in their own land, but they encouraged and prodded their children to excel academically, and they did. With the help of a few strategically fortuitous mentors along the way, Roy - an only child - and Pauline and her many sibs dispersed across the country and built families of their own, The Overstreets and their three grown children became our neighbors when Roy transferred to the NOAA lab in Seattle from his previous posting in Boulder.

We got to know their 3 kids – Frederika, Roy, and Marcie – and our families got to know each other over the years through bar mitzvahs and weddings. Frederika (Freddy), to our delight went into public health and then medical school. After finishing her medical degree she became a family medicine resident at the hospital in Seattle where her mother had been a nurse. Along the way she married one of her Peace Corps friends, who helped design and remodel Roger’s study (Gordon is now an architect, and he and Freddy have 2 kids of their own). And Freddy has now joined our faculty as a clinician based at Harborview, our county hospital.

During this period Roy and Pauline decided to move back to their ancestral home, and bought a magnificent old house on a hill at the edge of Wewoka. Several of Pauline's brothers and sisters also clustered around Wewoka, bringing their urban perspectives and mastery of a more complex urban world to the town. This family influx has helped shake a few of the cob-webs out of this sleepy, inbred town. One quote we heard that was attributed to one of the conservative white land-owners in the town was: "This place was alright until the Overstreets showed up."

The Overstreet-Jones clan also did something that few of us ever do: they gathered in their family members and reconstructed their lives and their relationships. As I heard one of Paulette's brother say: "We invented the family that we never had." The warmth and acceptance and inclusiveness of this family went far beyond the friendship that grew on the streets of Seattle: by the end of the trip, Roger fantasized about buying the house next door and hanging out his shingle. Life refracts into so many shards, and this trip has helped coalesce some of these fragments into the glowing rainbow that this country still has the power to create.