Tonya Bolden introduces and reads from her book Searching for Sarah Rector: The Richest Black Girl in America. Sarah Rector’s story began long before she was born with the event that came to be known as the “Trail of Tears.” Along with members of the five Native American tribes who were forcibly removed from the American South in the 1830s, were the people of African descent that they enslaved. Those who survived that dangerous journey were relocated to “Indian Country” west of the Mississippi River. In 1866, under pressure from the U.S. government, the Five Tribes made the blacks among them citizens of their nations. As such, these individuals and their children were able to apply for the land allotments that were being carved up in the 1890s in “I.T.” or Indian Territory—some of which was, as Tonya Bolden notes in Searching for Sarah Rector: The Richest Black Girl in America (Abrams, 2014), “Rough. Chock-full of rocks…and a tax burden.” But some of that same ground held oil, creating fortunes for landowners, including an 11-year-old girl. As Bolden explains, this is a story that requires some backtracking to tell it fully…. I think everyone’s first question about this book is, how did you discover this incredible story? I owe it all to a librarian! Sherelle Harris with Norwalk, Connecticut’s public library system. Sherelle sent me an e-mail in late June 2010. It began simply “FYI . . .” Then came a cut-and-paste of a short article about Sarah Rector. Sherelle’s closing words included “Couldn’t resist sharing this.” In sharing, she planted a seed. I had never heard of Sarah Rector. I knew very little about the lives of people of African descent who had been enslaved by Creeks and members of other Indian tribes. I knew what a gusher was but not all that much about the Oklahoma-Texas oil boom of the early 1900s. But I was most intrigued. The story called to me in part because a very good friend of mine was born and raised in Taft, Oklahoma, one of state's few remaining “all-black” towns. Years ago I wrote a sketch about my friend's father who was one of the pillars of that community decades ago. So I knew something about Taft. And Sarah was born on the outskirts of Taft. Many of the black people who benefited from the oil boom in the Oklahoma-Texas area in the early 1900s were citizens of the Native American nations that had enslaved them or their forbears for generations. Can you talk about that relationship? It takes a minute to wrap your mind around it all, especially if you aren’t a descendant of blacks who were enslaved by Native Americans. For those of us who aren’t, if we just stop and recognize the human-ness of all people we see that it’s not that mind-boggling. In all races/ethnicities there are individuals who do good, individuals who do evil, and individuals who do both. It may not be widely known, but it is not surprising that some Native Americans were slaveholders. In Sarah's case some of her forbears were enslaved by members of the Creek Nation, one of what is commonly called "Five Civilized Tribes"—tribes forced from their homelands in Alabama and elsewhere in the Southeast and into different sections of Indian Territory, today's Oklahoma. That forced migration included, for example, Sarah's great-grandparents, one of whom was held in slavery by a Creek chief. As I say in the book, while there are some accounts of Creek slaveholders treating their captives almost like family or hired hands, there are also accounts of brutality, from breaking up families in sales to subjecting a person to fifty lashes. After the Civil War, in which some members of the "Five Civilized Tribes" fought for the Union and some for the Confederacy, the U.S. government compelled these nations to abolish slavery and to make all blacks among them—whether always free or once-enslaved—citizens of their nations. Anyway, regardless of the status of these black children and adults, they and their descendants were called  "Creek freedmen," "Cherokee freedmen," and so on. As it just so happened, I was working on Searching for Sarah Rector when the expulsion of the Cherokee freedmen from the Cherokee Nation was in the news again. The practice of providing children of color with white guardians to oversee their incomes from the Oklahoma-Texas oil boom in the early 20th century was wrought with horrible abuses, yet out of those stories emerge others, such as the story of Kate Barnard, Oklahoma’s Commissioner or Charities and Corrections who went after “grafter guardians,” and T.J. Porter and Judge Thomas William Leahy, who handled (and approved expenditures of) Sarah Rector’s fortune. Indeed. To echo what I said earlier, there is good and bad in all groups. When I did that first surface research on Sarah Rector, the take-away was that blacks and Indians were not allowed to be guardians of oil-rich black and Indian children and that all white guardians of these children were crooks. After more reading, more analysis, I concluded that generalizations were not in order. They rarely are. Your book contains reproductions of documents, paintings, old postcards, archival photos, allotment maps, period advertisements, and news articles—all of which were necessary to piece this story together. How difficult was it to research? The research was not as difficult as it would have been 10, 20, or 50 years ago. I believe I started preliminary research at Library of Congress’s Chronicling America. I soon moved on to subscription-based sites which have even more newspapers as well as census records and other documents. Searching for postcards and photographs at the websites of the Oklahoma Historical Society and Tuskegee University, for example, didn’t cost a dime. This is truly a sublime time to be writing history.  So much is just a touch (and maybe a few dollars) away. And the depth! It gets better by the minute! As much as I love researching online there are always good books I need to read. And good people I need to meet in person, online, or over the telephone. For example, in some of the newspapers I read online I found Muskogee County Court notices about Sarah Rector’s estate, notices that included the probate case number. So I called Muskogee County District Court and asked about getting copies of whatever was in that file. When I was told that those records were in deep storage my heart sank. But I held out hope. I sent my contact at the court, deputy clerk Linda Garrison, a copy of my book Maritcha (Abrams, 2005) and explained that I wanted to do a book on Sarah Rector—sort of like that book. A few weeks later I received the first of many, many, many thick packages with photocopies of documents from that probate case. That was in January of 2011. By June I had a mountain of paper. I later learned that another outfit has all or most of the documents on microfilm at a location not that far from me, but, hey, you start where you start. Plus, I had a real person at the Muskogee County District Court off whom I could occasionally bounce things and ask questions. You can’t talk to microfilm. I often tell young people that if they want to know about process, take a look at my acknowledgments for starters. Your observation that the farther away (in distance) news articles about Sarah Rector were published during this period, the more outrageous the claims about her were made, was fascinating. Does that knowledge impact the way you think about or will approach research in the future? Absolutely! We have to use common sense. We have to have wisdom and discernment. We have to notice things. During my search for Sarah Rector I noticed that many newspapers and magazines were not doing original reporting. Instead, editors were reprinting or paraphrasing items picked up from other periodicals (sometimes without attribution). Much of what was presented as news was hearsay. I hope young people who read the book will take note of this and become more discerning readers whether they are reading a book or a blog. It appears that after enjoying a good income for a number of years, Sarah settled into a modest family life, but like many people, lost her fortune in the 1920s and 30s. Have you discovered any other details about her later life? I don’t think I discovered much more of significance about Sarah Rector’s adult life than I mentioned in the book. In all honesty, I didn’t research her adult life that hard because I pretty much knew from the outset that the book was going to be less of a biography and more of a snapshot of a moment in time. You state in the book, what’s missing is Sarah’s voice. What is it about her you would still like to know? Where to begin! I would love to know what she knew about her estate when she was 12, 13, 14. I would love to know what was going on in her head. What did she want to do with all that money? As a child, did she ever set foot on any of the farms that were purchased for her? Did she know as a child that she owned a building in Muskogee, about a mile from where she lived? How did she cope with the attention? Was she happy as a child? Was she scared at times? I have to comment about the language…you incorporate so many words and phrases in the book (“plute,” “ballyhooed,” “doodads,“ “low-down dirty”) that add to sense of the period. You are both a wordsmith and a historian here! Thank you! When I talk with young people about writing and I urge them to not regard research as a dull duty but as detective work; I also urge them to think of writing as acting. To act you must get into character. That takes more than finding out what happened and when. It means listening to the music of an era, finding out about popular dishes and menus, what things cost in that time and place, and how people spoke. Searching for Sarah Rector is about rough-and-tumble times in early Oklahoma. A Victorian or, say, a Baptist-preacher type tone wouldn’t be a good fit. When you immerse yourself in subject—pore over primary document after primary document (written and visual)—you often find yourself “in character” without even thinking about. Suddenly you’ve picked up a little lingo and the rhythm of a time and place. And one last thing about vocabulary: I believe in sending young people to the dictionary. I believe in giving them a chance to be curious, puzzle things out, and have A-ha! moments. I believe in giving them a reason to ask a parent or teacher or older sib a question.   Tonya Bolden introduces and reads from her book Searching for Sarah Rector: The Richest Black Girl in America.