OU alumnus Michael Gibson released a novel utilizing fictional accounts with historical details to explore the hardships of two female OU students and the mistreatment of ethnic groups in Oklahoma.
“Leaving Pontotoc County” is the second of two books Gibson has published in his “Broomcorn Field Series”. He said he has worked on this book for eleven years and highlighted the importance of historical accuracy in his novel.
“I think fiction works if it's historically accurate, and it can actually help people understand historical events more than just reading the history,” Gibson said, “I don't know how you would describe the suffering that these women went through in WWII if you just did a sort of factual recounting.”
Each chapter of the book includes a summary of historical events during WWII. Gibson said most of these summaries contain events related to the mistreatment of ethnic groups at the time, including Japanese internment camps, the Zoot Suit Riot of Los Angeles and Detroit and Mobile's race riots.
Gibson said his book discussing topics of race and gender was published at a unique time, as it came out six days before the Oklahoma Board of Education passed rules limiting the discussion of race and gender. He said his novel includes a character who was a victim of the Tulsa Race Massacre, a topic Oklahoma is figuring out how to teach in light of state legislation after suppressing education on it for decades.
“It's an important issue. These are the sort of things that we need to talk about,” Gibson said, “I'm very saddened that there would be any suggestion that we can't talk about things that we need to talk about. It's just weird.”
Gibson said he hopes his books can serve as a way to ease people into complex or even unknown parts of history.
“I felt that these women had untold stories that were really important,” Gibson said, “If you think about it, there wasn't any paradigm for what you do when there aren't men around. These women were basically having to do everything and make it up as they went along. That's really an important issue to me.”
“Leaving Pontotoc County” is available on Amazon alongside Gibson's other book, “The Broomcorn Field”. He said he also hopes to release another book in the future that will continue exploring the lives of Oklahomans during and after WWII.
