"Mars"
told by Katherine Marson
The settlement of Marsonton, Oklahoma came nearly sixty years after the Louisiana Purchase and a few years after the Civil War. My uncle Allen used to tell me the story of how his grandfather, Dwight Marson, built our family's first house on the spot where my childhood home stood with the help of the other first settlers. They were builders from other towns, he told me. They were attracted to the forests and forests of timber set right there in the very middle of nothing but plains ready for crops. The forest seemed endless, and it rained daily, and sometimes for days straight, so irrigating water for the crops surrounding the town would be an easy chore. But the most exciting discovery after a few weeks of attempting to go through and around the forest for those First Few (as they were later called), was that after the forest ended, flat land stretched for twelve miles from the end of the forest.
This was the Bright Side, not in the figurative sense, they called it “the Bright Side” and it is where most of the original houses and the resorts were built in the early nineteen-hundreds when Marsonton was up-and-running and attracting more and more visitors every year. The appeal to those visitors was that the sun blazed like two in the afternoon for eighteen hours every day on that side, and everyone who stayed there for at least fifteen minutes uncovered got some color. Marsonton road ran the way the First Few came, through the forest, and because those builders and sons and daughters of builders living on the bright side absolutely needed the forest to continue to construct and expand the town, the First Few had a swift vote to keep the forest as a part of the town. What everyone noticed though, was that the intense wind, rain and sometimes downright weird weather in the thick of the forest was not something that anyone wanted to experience more than once, so it was outlawed for some time for anyone to even step foot in the forest without what our first mayor, Elliot Kindler called “official purpose.”
Some of the First Few kept former slaves and their sons and daughters who, according to what they told the government men who came once a year to snoop into their business, were being paid in food, and were quite eager to work without being whipped. Trust me, those government men didn’t want to make that buggy trip through the forest more than once a year in those days, so things were pretty free and understood in Marsonton. Even until today, not one of the people I know from the old Marsonton would debate that it was the young black boys who in the nineteen-twenties or so, when it was common for young black boys to do the dirty jobs on resorts, began to first call the place “Mars” and to liken the town to something from outer space. At that time, those boys were referring to the forest and not the resorts of the Bright Side, because even though Kindler’s Law (as it was called) stood until then, every experimenting person in Marsonton had, at one time shed some of their fears about that thick forest and walked inside. The young people, black and white, found any intoxicating thing they could that made their brains think the forest was even crazier than it was, and were regularly picked up by policemen in rain slickers on horseback and taken back to their homes.
When those children became adults, and more people were calling the place “Mars” instead of Marsonton, the name of the town was changed. My great-grandfather, Dwight Marson, had become ill and passed away many years before, and the only living member of the First Few, Deborah Thomas, who designed the town’s original seal of a hickory tree covering a blazing sun (and when others looked at it, it may have been a sun illuminating a tree) protested passionately in her old age, but she didn’t succeed, and Marsonton officially became Mars, Oklahoma on the first of January, 1943. My uncle used to tell me that people at that time were finding less and less need for the forest and a few wondered in secret if Mars needed the forest at all. Then there would be a drought because the water men who worked for the town had skipped a day of collecting rain water for the town purifier, or a house would catch fire in the sun and a new one would have to be built, and everyone would once again understand how much they really did need the forest. A few generations had settled into the idea of building and farming and setting up their shops and stands at the start of the bright side so that the tourists seeking tans could buy their tanning lotions and high-grade sunscreens and toothbrushes if they’d forgotten them. For some time, Mars was a beach town with no beach, where many young people in Oklahoma with vehicles went to get away from their parents for a weekend.
Then some fifteen years after that, after some of those tourists established at least a temporary residence in Mars, a mayor named Jack Keen, who was a popular radio news anchor in Oklahoma before that and was carrying out his dream of retiring to Mars, put together a commission to explore the forest for development. It was an effort, in secret, to move the blacks out of the bright side, but officially they were “exploring ways to deal with overcrowding in Mars.” At first, Keen’s team knocked down a mile of the forest, and even without the towering trees the sky was a brooding black, and at any time, heavy spring raindrops splattered everywhere for fifteen minutes. The first few to migrate were compared by Keen to the First Few that had founded the old Marsonton, and all but three of the twenty families were black, but all had enough wealth to afford comfort, and the homes that were built were made to keep them comfortable in such a terrible climate.
With the success of Keen’s first venture, the persistent overcrowding of Mars, and a true reluctance by anyone to want to develop on the farm land, another mile of the forest was knocked down. This time, the young and hip black people, their white friends, anyone under thirty and single who worked, and people who were just tired of the Bright Side moved there. There were forty households within that mile. There was a walking park where anyone who could dodge large, blunt hail could walk a dog, there were rows of six-apartment houses set up. A few lived in one-story houses with triple-layered aluminum roofs that sounded like you were inside huge metal drum when the weather got terrible. When I was younger, before all of those types of houses were torn down for good, I went into one of them and I couldn’t get the sound of the hail orchestra banging on the roof out of my head for two weeks, and sometimes my mother still raises her voice when she thinks I didn’t hear something she’s said.
After that venture by Keen was an even greater success, deeper into the forest, two more miles were cut down, taller apartment buildings were built, and there was a mass migration of one hundred and forty-five people into an absolutely unbearable climate. Side-streets were built to Marsonton Road. The population of Mars had evened. For five months, the Dark Side of Mars was an attraction, and those who drove the forest drive along Marsonton road were able to see the homes of the working families in Mars. All visitors saw the sturdily-built homes and the Army Jeeps parked in the driveways. All visitors saw how intuitive housewives found ways to have the weather wash and dry their clothes in a total of four minutes. All visitors saw how even little children could catch rain water and purify it with a sponge. All visitors never stopped.
The weather was so bad in fact that the people of the Dark Side did absolutely all of their business on the Bright Side. A hospital was built on the Bright Side near the forest edge before the winter that year, and it was maybe one mile from the school, which accepted everyone. The people of the dark Side were absolutely needed to maintain the Bright Side, and the Bright Side compensated them with fair wages and comfortable living arrangements for everyone. All were happy until that first winter, when the Bright Side remained sunny and the regular afternoon temperature dropped from one hundred and five to ninety-five degrees, but the Dark Side experienced unbearable weather like no one at that time had ever reported. Right after Thanksgiving, there was a snowstorm that poured seven feet of snow onto the forest and then after everyone was snowed in, the snow froze overnight and the forest was covered in ice. Many missed up to two weeks of work. Those who could leave their homes spent their time trying to help others leave theirs. Some were photographed jumping from their windows into twelve-foot snow banks that they were told had not frozen.
Rain came next, and the melting of the snow stretched for a forty-yard ring around the forest. Inside, the air was tropical, and the trees were lodged in mud and dying. A few properties and vehicles were damaged every day because of loose trees, and black mud covered the porches of the houses and the vestibules of the apartment buildings, making the ground as gloomy as the sky. The residents of Mars banded to clean up the mess, and committees were formed to oversee the cleanup. But until February, the temperature inside the forest on the Dark side was regularly warmer than the temperature on the Bright Side. Then frigid winds blew at the residents of the dark side from every direction. Some were caught walking in the streets with mud boots and shorts when the winds came, and everyone scurried to their homes when they did. By the next day icicles were hanging from everything that had an edge on the Dark Side and no one dared leave their homes until the temperature on the Dark Side rose to at least zero degrees.
After three months of inconveniences (Marsonton Road was shut down for six weeks and imports and exports to and from the bright side were bleak), the ice melted, and water stretched all the way to the middle of the Bright Side, ruining the foundations of some of the houses. For that entire summer, men from the Dark Side could find work in extracting water from the ground to purify it and sell it to anyone who might brave the Bright Side sun for longer than a human needed to. The people of the Bright Side saw the catastrophic weather on the Dark Side as a business blessing, and water was in its greatest abundance ever. The people of Bright Side consumed water like they never had. There were more patients treated for water intoxication at the hospital than for any other ailments combined. The residents of the bright side of Mars were now drinking enough water to brave the intense sun all day. But the weather had killed nine people on the Dark Side, and hail was falling regularly again. Babies were being brought down Marsonton Road to the hospital every day with serious head trauma from falling hail. Some people who were inquiring about moving back to the Bright Side were being told that it would cost double to rent there than a year before.
There were large meetings every Sunday after church where the mayor at the time, Roosevelt Anderson, did his best to remind the attendees from the Dark Side that although the weather was too unpredictable to withstand there, their houses still stood like new. I was born nearly twenty years after that. By that time, a whole generation had grown up on the Dark Side. There were other children at school who everyone knew were from the Dark Side because of their dead expressions and weather-beaten raincoats. I remember sitting in classrooms and seeing some of the boys whose parents told them that the people of the dark side were something to be hated and would run near the head of a Dark Side boy and bang two books together so loud that they would have to be removed from class. The boys from the dark side never even flinched. They were used to all sorts of noises, and they had so many stories about the loud sounds and the sorts of animals that appeared from behind trees where they lived.
By the time I understood that people were different, I realized right away that everyone really hated each other. Three thousand people lived in Mars at that time. The people of the Dark Side hated the Bright Side, hated it’s residents, hated it’s perfect weather, and the people of the Bright Side hated the Dark Side because they were the only source of cheap labor in the town, they secretly hated the town they all loved, and their employment at the rickety resorts, the minature golf course, and everywhere else on the Bright Side of Mars was necessary to the existence of the town. The people fought daily and argued in stores, had fistfights in the school, bosses and employees shot dirty looks at each other. There was some talk that a fence might be built around the Dark Side, but no particular reason for this was ever given to me.
Most of the boys who lived on the Dark Side called themselves “Dark Side Boys” and their signature DSB was seen everywhere in the town, long before the older people in the town understood what was going on. As long as rain and hail fell on the Dark Side, the Dark Side Boys could provide the town with water, obviously outnumbering the water men who officially extracted and purified water for the town. When I was a teenager, the Dark Side Boys were some of the wealthiest people in the town. The older ones controlled most of the water-purifying and selling operations in the town, and almost all of them bought lavish houses on the Bright Side for their families. One, Gary Jackson, bought one of the resorts, the Sexington Club, and renamed it “The Hail Hut” and turned it into a night club. Half the town sold water on carts and at the new water shops popping up everywhere, and the other half were a generation raised on the notion of needing water. My uncle would tell me at that time that he was still proud of Mars. He thought they’d figured out a formula for staying there.
“Water,” he’d tell me, “all we all need here is the right amount of water, and we can keep this place forever.”
I was curious then about who he meant by “we,” but I never questioned it, and after my father died, I was scared to ever say anything that went against the idea that the residents of the Bright Side needed control of the town’s water.
That is how things began to end. One Saturday in 1974, my father, Steven Marson was jogging around the Bright side as he always did, bothering a water-seller at each mile for water. That day, no one wanted to sell water to him, and water shops were "closed", men with water carts were on their breaks, and none of the free fountains that no one ever really used worked. I was told that a man that day laughed at my father and told him to run around the town again with no shirt, and maybe then he’d sell him some water. He only took two steps after that, and collapsed onto the pavement. His skin had to be scraped from the ground and the casket at his funeral couldn't be left open. The town erupted the next day. Everyone found a way to blame the Dark Side Boys. Gary Jackson was shot and killed inside The Hail Hut after an argument with a Bright Side resident he wouldn’t allow inside. That Sunday, the largest meeting ever in Mars took place and for the first time, microphones needed to be used so that the speakers could be heard over all of the shouting. Individuals were engaged in enormous fist fights. The chaos separated with nightfall, and the next morning, everyone who was on a side awoke with a deeper hatred for the other.
Being that the school and the hospital and the police precinct were all on the Bright Side, and those who got water and purified water and sold water were from the Dark Side, the eleven-day war between the two sides was the most painful time of all of our lives. School was cancelled, and those with able bodies were put to work for each of their families to find water. The Dark Side Boys had traveled up Marsonton Road into Oklahoma to obtain a nice amount of guns and ammunition with the money they still had and threatened to shoot and kill anyone who roamed into the Dark Side searching for water, and fourteen people were shot and killed because after four days, there was no water on the Bright Side. Some were contemplating drinking out of their toilets and sat in their bathrooms for some time wondering what would happen to their waste if they did.
Town officials were told that the negotiations would take place on the Dark Side, and in the audio transcripts, the voices were muffled by the sound of hail banging on the roof. No agreement was made other than that water would be distributed on the edge of the Dark Side every day at seven a.m. until eleven a.m. and that it would be sold at ten times the previous value. For the first three days, the last three days of the war, seventeen people were shot and killed trying to steal extra water on the DSB water line. The line usually stretched for two miles and everyone who needed water usually got it, but within two days, all of the town’s wealth was on the Dark Side. Businesses on the Bright Side were closing, and people on the line were asking for jobs purifying water, because it seemed that water was all anyone in the town cared about. My uncle Allen Marson was trying to become mayor of Mars at a time when no one even cared about politics to remember the name of the mayor, and he was probably the strongest advocate for simply fighting the Dark Side and taking back the water, and many others were having their difficulties understanding the fate of Mars and the way the town was changing.
On the eleventh day of the war, my uncle found himself thirsty and waiting on line for water for the first time. He met others like himself-those who wanted and needed water and thought that Mars needed water. There were sour faces and annoyed tones all through the line. There was talk that a man was shot and killed that morning for asking for three free ounces just to fill up his container. A woman screamed and all of the people on the line, focusing their anger, ran toward the forest. Some could not avoid the gun shots. Others ran ahead and found any water that they could drink, filling containers and avoiding gunshots to take them back to their families and to grow their crops. My uncle Allen decided in his hatred for the Dark Side to set some things on fire and soon, many of the trees were in flames and the black sky became blacker with the smoke.
Many were seeing the Dark Side for the first time, and after nearly all of the trees left in the forest burned, the strong and sturdy houses were visible even from the far end of the Bright Side. They stood until the state came to take control of the town. My mother forced me to go with her in the first car up Marsonton Road and we left the town before all of the dead were buried in the plains. No more crops were ever grown and after a few weeks of persuasion by the state, no one lived in Mars. The resorts were torn down and no one dared to step foot on the Bright Side uncovered. The shorter houses with the reinforced roofs on the Dark Side were also torn down. The apartment buildings were used to examine weather and to collect rain for water. After ten years of state control, Mars was supplying thirty-nine percent of the state of Oklahoma’s water, and everyone involved in that process thought it was a silly idea for anyone to have ever lived there.
