LITTLE BROWN KOKO

 Little Brown Koko was a feature story in a monthly farm magazine that my mother subscribed to.  Little Brown Koko (LBK) was young country boy about my age.  He was what we would now call “of African American” decent.  He too lived on a farm in the country.  I related very much to the stories of LBK.  He was always getting into mischievous trouble like I did, like forgetting to gather the eggs or feed the hogs.  But, like me, he had a mother that would scold him and love him at the same time.  Now that was another thing we shared.  LBK’s mother was a large soft loving woman.  She was referred to in the stories as LBK’s big fat mammy.   My mother was what you could call built more for comfort than speed.  And just like LBK I loved to crawl up into in my mother’s substantial lap and have her read to me. 

I would pick up the long anticipated magazine from our rural mailbox and run as fast as I could to our dilapidated farmhouse and crawl up onto my mother’s ample lap to hear the latest LBK story.  Click on the below thumbnails to see a sample of  LBK stories.  Thanks to my wife, who is a pack rat, for saving this book from long ago.

Those were happy secure days living in rural Oklahoma with a loving caring functional family of a hard working father, loving mother, two sisters and a brother.  My father worked for the local land baron for as little as a dollar for ten hours of hard manual labor, six days a week.  Little did I know that our country was in the grips of the great depression.  Little did I know that the dust storms in dust bowl Oklahoma wasn’t normal.  I can still recall the blowing drifting sand making sand dunes against fence posts leaving only a few inches of the post protruding out of the sand on what had been fertile soil. 

Years later while discussing the dust bowl with someone back east, he said, “The dust bowl was caused by poor farming practices, wasn’t it?”  My response was, “Well, the fact that it didn’t rain for five years contributed some to the problem.”