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Hidden Literacies

Reproduction of Prisoner Card

Walter Duncan Prisoner’s Card. Box 69, Record no. 50875. Photograph Cards, Oklahoma State Penitentiary Collection [2010.055].

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Walter and Dollie Duncan The Duncans lived in the Stilwell area of Oklahoma and may have been descendants of one of the old families of Cherokee people who had relocated to that area before the trail of tears (Starr). Walter Duncan was born in Stilwell on May 22, 1921 and died there on February 9, 1989. He is buried with many other members of the Duncan family, including his mother Dollie, at the Salem Indian Cemetery in Bell, Adair County, Oklahoma. Walter married Lena Mae, who lived from 1919 to 1985. In May 19, 1944, he enlisted in the Army at Ft. Still, Oklahoma, and served for one year and three months as a Private during World War II. His enlistment record shows a grammar school education and employment as a “semiskilled lumberman, raftsman, and woodchopper.” He was married at the time he had enlisted. The two had at least one son, Daley C. “G-boy” Duncan, who was born March 4, 1948, in the Bell Community and died on August 9, 2018 in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.3

A few years after serving in the army, Walter was found guilty of burglary and sent to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester to serve a minimum two-year term (though he was released after one year). His prisoner card included here [Figure 3] is reproduced courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City, OK and reveals that he had a third grade education and was Baptist.4 Soon after arriving Walter was assigned to the #1 Gang and then moved to the trusty building. Directions and conditions for correspondence between prisoners and their families are outlined in the heading of the letter in Figure 1. Prisoners were instructed to “write plainly, using one sheet only, regarding business or family matters, nothing else.” Despite its legibility to other Cherokee, Walter’s letter to his mother written in Sequoyan likely would not have been understood as plainly written to guards who might be reading prisoner letters to ensure the content was of business or personal matters. It’s not clear if the address to his mother is written by him, since we have no sample of his writing in English to compare it to, if he indeed had learned to write in English during the course of his third-grade education. Were the guards able to read Cherokee they might not have let this letter be sent as it provides a clear picture of life in the prison among the Cherokee inmates.

The letter opens with a greeting on a Sunday evening during which Walter has “prepared to talk with” his mother, Dollie, “a little on paper.” The next phrase is particularly interesting in light of the penitentiary’s directions regarding correspondences between prisoners and their immediate family: “We are really having a lot of trouble conversing with letters, but it will only be a short time longer.” Was this trouble one of learning to read and write with the syllabary itself as Duncan’s recourse to Ama’s pristine handwriting might suggest? Could he have been making his script so legible for Dollie's benefit so she might be able to use a Cherokee syllabary chart to easily decode the individual ‘letters’? Or was it that the guards themselves were uncomfortable with the letter itself written in Sequoyan, a language that in all likelihood was illegible to them? How could they ensure he wasn’t sending information beyond that which was permitted in the instructions that open this stationary?

His letter mentions that he had received her previous correspondence to him in Cherokee and that this letter is his response to the questions she asked of him in her letter to him, as though they were talking with each other: “Yes, I received this letter in Cherokee” that she had written to him, and “he was glad” she said in that letter that she was well. This suggests that he had the ability to read her letters in Cherokee, or at least access to another prisoner who had the ability to read Sequoyan, though it is not clear whether Walter was also able to produce the script itself. Perhaps his incarceration presented an opportunity to learn to write Sequoyan in order to correspond with his mother in their shared language, a language that would provide them privacy.

He goes on to say that his employment conditions were changing as of Monday, March 12, 1951 when he would move from milking the prison’s cows to working with another Cherokee person, named ᎠᎵᏍᏓᏩᏘ “ A-li-s-da-wa-ti [a name]” who works “alone at the front, where the leaders walk around.” As his prisoner card indicates, he had already been “assigned to trusty building” almost a year earlier. The trusty system employed prisoners in a hierarchical system of organization. Those at the top of the prison hierarchy guarded and punished other prisoners, while other jobs included working with prison civilian employees, monitoring halls to deliver mail and distribute medicine, and working the floor as cage bosses to maintain peace in the barracks. Those assigned to the ‘trusty building’ would have had license to dole out harsh punishments to other prisoners or adopt other administrative functions (Gutterman). Walter Duncan was explaining his life in prison and that he was moving into a position of working with “leaders” who “walk around.”

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Walter Duncan Prisoner Card