Source of book: Borrowed from the library, but I later found a copy at a book sale.
Gerald Haslam was a local author, native to the Bakersfield-adjacent town of Oildale, with deep Okie roots. He led a colorful life as a youth - working the fields, the oilfields, and doing a stint in the Army - before finally settling down to a career as a writer and educator.
Years ago, when my wife was getting her college prerequisites before nursing school, she did a unit on the Dust Bowl. As part of that, she wrote a badass paper on Steinbeck, spoke with former residents of Sunset Camp, and had a conversation with Haslam.
I hadn’t actually read any of his stuff, but then my eldest kid borrowed this book, and enjoyed it, although he recommends Straight White Male as even better.
Haslam wrote in multiple genres, from biography to essays to novels to short stories. That Constant Coyote is the later - a collection of short stories set in and around California’s San Joaquin Valley.
While I didn’t grow up in Bakersfield, I moved to Kern County in my teens, and bought my first home here. My wife grew up here, so we both have significant roots in the area. Thus, these stories are set in places I know pretty well, and Haslam brings them to life vividly.
The stories themselves are quite varied in topic, mood, and message. Some are heart-rendingly sad. Others are laugh-out-loud hilarious. The characters are mostly Okie sorts, but there are exceptions. (One of the best stories is about an African-American young man who follows his grandfather into bull riding and the rodeo scene. I believe it is loosely based on someone the author knew.) In every story, however, the characters are wonderfully vivid and so true to life. Haslam was right when he complained that the central valley was woefully neglected as a setting for literature.
For most people, all they will know of this part of California is The Grapes of Wrath. As good as that book is - and I love Steinbeck - there are other perspectives that are well worth reading. I recently read The Consequences by Manuel Munoz, for example - another set of short stories about valley denizens. While somewhat different in background, Haslam also brings a much-needed look at the people and places in our area.
Haslam wrote a preface to the book, and I wanted to note a line in there, about his own life history.
I toiled in the interim at a packing shed near Delano, loading boxcars with crates of table grapes. The fruit was picked by Mexican and Filipino adults who labored in searing sun, while cooler and more desirable jobs in the shed - jobs such as mine - in those years went exclusively to whites, often just kids.
This sort of self-awareness and understanding of privilege - economic and racial are just two examples - that undergird Haslam’s writing. Like the best authors, the book never condescends, but looks respectfully and empathetically at all.
In one of the stories, a ne’er-do-well young man complains to his responsible sister that he can’t find the “right” kind of work.
“Sister, me and the guys we look for work, but we can’t find nothin’ but nigger work - packin’ sheds, mowin’ lawns, them deals. We hold ourselves to be white men.”
In the title story, about a man returning to his land up on Breckenridge Mountain as he is dying of cancer, he and his wife note that a bounty hunter finally killed the coyote that had been plaguing his ranch.
“He poisoned that old nemesis of yours.”
“Well, that’s just great,” I replied sarcastically.
She stopped and stared at me. “Clint,” she said, “you’ve been after him for years.”
“I’ve been after him. It was between us, not some damned state hunter.”
“Men!” Doris shook her head and began brewing coffee.
It is a great moment in a good story, one that touches on the circle of life and the inevitably of death.
There is another line in the harrowing story of the Keyesville Massacre - when Federal troops murdered dozens of Tubatulabal men in cold blood. (The commanding officer was court martialed, and later committed suicide.)
In the story, the young man, Hawk, is called lice by one of the soldiers, and he responds, “At least we have not become savages.”
In another story, Uncle Fate Newby is an aging wrestling champion. One day, an African American man appears out of the blue, and challenges him for his crown. And loses, but even Fate knows it was darn close, and decides to concede his title.
It is an interesting story in part because it shows the complicated racial relations that still characterize California. This isn’t the South, where social distinctions still hold considerable sway. I grew up in a working class neighborhood, where we were one of a handful of white families in an otherwise minority block. There is a certain comradery and respect among people who work hard and struggle to make rent that isn’t seen as much in white collar subcultures. Respect can be earned, regardless of race. That is how I grew up - playing with kids and earning respect.
In this story is also a pretty hilarious line from the narrator, a young boy who watches all this. At the opening of the story, Fate is claiming Shirley Temple is a shrunken adult, not a kid.
You see, Uncle Fate Newby didn’t cotton to uncertainty. He lived in a known cosmos largely of his own creation, and few of his fellow philosophers have been better equipped to define the limits of reality.
Another excellent story is the one about the unemployed, nearly homeless family, part of an encampment near the river. As so often happens, the do-gooders show up with their self-righteousness and condescension, and wonder why things go badly. The narrator’s father asks the do-gooders what church they are from, and they seem reluctant to say so.
“Just what I figured,” he said. “I knew I seen this preacher before. Member when we tried to worship at your church last summer and you run us off?”
Our former church, to their credit, wasn’t this way, but we all know the sort. Oh yes. This is the problem with “charity” as a paradigm - it preserves the hierarchy between giver and receiver. Justice, on the other hand…
There are multiple stories in which class and race intersect. Another of those is “The Horned Toad,” where the old Mexican great- grandmother has to be uprooted from her home and come live with her daughter and her white husband. The young boy is at first scared of her, particularly since she pretends she cannot speak or understand English - before slipping and revealing that she can in fact do so. There is a hilarious exchange later in the story.
No more did I sneak around the house to avoid Grandma after school. Instead, she waited for me and discussed my efforts in class gravely, telling mother that I was “muy inteligente,” and that I should be sent to the nuns who would train me. I would make a fine priest. When Ese Gringo [the father] hear that, he smiled and said, “He’d make a fair-to-middlin’ Holy Roller preacher too.” Even Mom had to chuckle, and my great-grandmother shook her finger at Ese Gringo. “Oh, you debil, Sharlie!”
I don’t have a quote from it, but I do want to mention “My Dear Mr. Thorp,” which is a sequence of letters to the editor of a literary publication from aspiring authors hoping to be published, along with the responses. It’s really very funny, and one suspects Haslam was all too familiar with rejection notes.
Another truly hilarious story is “The Great Waldorf Astoria Caper,” about a wealthy local man who brings back a gold digger former beauty queen, and all the fallout from that. There is a barroom confrontation between the old guy and his nemesis, leading to this gem:
“Can’t even kick a man’s ass when you want to. Whatever happened to the Bill a Rights?”
I have literally had clients like that. It’s a thing here among some of the old timers.
Another story is a poignant look at an older couple, whose fights have become a dance, as the son notes. A recurrent one is about the husband’s driving. For him, a car is freedom, and for her, his car is the way he avoids dealing with things.
It culminates in an incident where he is found driving the wrong way on the freeway. This is personal to me, because my late grandfather was the same way - a terrible driver. His keys finally were surrendered when he made the evening news driving the wrong way on the freeway.
Haslam’s telling focuses more on the marital dynamics, and again, he is very perceptive about how this works - something I have seen in my law practice time and again.
There is another dysfunctional family dynamic at work in “The Welder’s Cap.” I noted above the lazy brother who just wants to drink beer and sell dope with his buddies. The responsible sister is literally the only one in the family with a job, and is also going to college. This doesn’t get her respect from her mother. (The father is deceased.)
“When I was your age, I was married and had me two younguns. I wasn’t a-paintin’ my eyelids to make men look at me. I wasn’t goin’ to no classes at night. No Ma’am. There’s a whole lot school don’t teach you. I don’t know why you can’t settle down and get married and give me some grandchildren.”
She responds:
“Well, I can quit at the bank and go to the park, drink beer with Brother and his buddies. I’m sure one of them’ll be happy to give me babies…and probably VD…”
And later:
“It’s young girls nowadays wanta act just like menfolk. They don’t stay home with children. They don’t cook no more. They don’t sew. They don’t even get jobs. Nosir, they get careers. Always takin’ classes.” She looked at me then and pleaded, “Why can’t you just settle down?”
If this sounds to you like J. D. Vance and the Republican party’s view of women, you are not mistaken. It also sounds like my mother and her expectations of my wife.
The double standard is apparent: there is no corresponding nagging to Brother to grow up. But what is really at stake is that she is going to eventually leave and move out, and the stability of the family will lose its keystone.
“Missing in Action” takes a look at the Japanese American experience during and after World War Two. It is in the form of a conversation between a father and son, with the son finding out some unpleasant things about his father. This is, unfortunately, a bit close to home for me.
The son mentions the push to give at least a pittance of reparations to those who were put in concentration camps like Manzanar during the war. The father vehemently objects. What follows is talk about the Mirahashis, neighbors of the father before the war, and their fate.
Although this was written about 40 years ago, it is shocking how proto-MAGA the father is already. Complaining about “liberals selling out the working man,” referring to whites as “real Americans,” and eventually admitting to his son’s horror, that he had helped torch the Mirahashis’ home after the war. People he had bought groceries from back in the day.
And finally, it comes out that the Mirahashis’ son fought as an American in the war, and didn’t make it back.
As the story makes clear - and I can’t do it justice in this post - the father is actually haunted by what he did, but is so deep in self-protective denial and layers of rationalization that he can’t bring himself to a place of repentance and healing. As I said, far far too close to home. And a really effective story too.
I am glad I read this book, and am impressed by Haslam’s writing. He should be better known outside Kern County than he is. I’d definitely recommend seeking out one of his books.
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