Not All Okies Are White: The Lives of Black Cotton Pickers in Arizona. (Book Reviews).

Not All Okies Are White: The Lives of Black Cotton Pickers in Arizona. By Geta LeSeur. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, c. 2000. Pp. xviii, 247. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8262-1271-9.)

Geta LeSeur's book is surely the most exhaustive history of Randolph, Arizona, ever written. At 231 pages of text, it weighs in at well over a page per resident of the small Casa Grande Valley farming community. Randolph was originally white, was once majority-black, and now includes a large minority population of Mexican-Americans and American Indians. LeSeur's history of the town is based on dozens of oral history interviews and is divided into five parts: a general introduction and four groups of transcribed oral narratives from residents, each of which is preceded by a brief introduction.

LeSeur, who teaches English, black studies, and women's studies, edited the transcripts of interviews to capture the "voice of each narrator" (p. 10), and the published transcripts no doubt accomplish this goal. She also "aimed for a natural, simple vocabulary and style, free of heavy-handed academic jargon" (p. 10) in her introductions to the five main parts of the book. This is a laudable objective in theory, but what emerges in print is too often patronizing and overly simplistic. In these introductions the people of Randolph are forever "choppin', irrigatin', or operatin' machinery [sic]" (p. 191). I found the practice of dropping g's (in order, I assume, to sound more "authentic" in print) overdone and, ultimately, aggravatin'. The habit is also unnecessary; the author's compassion for her unlettered interviewees is evident enough without it. It must be said that LeSeur's editors at the University of Missouri Press did her no favors by allowing this practice to pass review.

LeSeur's introductions could also tell us more about the history of black farm workers in the trans-Mississippi West and the people of Randolph's place in it. Not All Okies Are White is unique in that it focuses on black cotton pickers, a heretofore overlooked minority in Arizona, and in that it uses the methods of oral history to reconstruct their community history. LeSeur creates an interesting power map of the town through her interviews. However, her historiographical overviews are slight and contain some curious errors. For instance, the people of Hale County, Alabama, the subjects of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Baton Rouge, 1941), are "Appalachian" (pp. 97, 187). LeSeur also claims that academics and documentarians have paid little attention to communities of poor African Americans (p. 187), but a collection of exactly these kinds of monographs would fill several library shelves.

The research behind the book, which is considerable, was quite obviously a labor of love. LeSeur expresses pleasure at several points in the book that the hard-working people of Randolph would open their homes to an "outside" researcher and share their lives with her. The stories they related also make it clear that LeSeur asked good questions in her interviews. As a whole, however, the book leaves too many questions unanswered: What made these "Okies" (more accurately, "Arkies") leave their lives of labor on the cotton farms of the South for labor on the cotton farms of the Southwest? In what ways were their lives better or worse in Arizona than they had been in Arkansas? Ultimately, Not All Okies Are White fails to live up to its excellent title.