Redneck!
The Redneck is being made into a pop figure, romanticized and defanged. That may be just a tad premature.
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While all true, bona fide Good Ole Boys have been at least fringe Rednecks, not all Rednecks rise to be Good Ole Boys. No. Their gizzards don’t harbor enough of something—ambition, good fortune, con, education, opportunity, flint, self-propellants, saddle burrs, chickenshit, whatever—and so they continue to breed and largely perpetuate themselves in place, defanged Snopeses never to attain, accumulate, bite the propertied gentry, or smite their tormentors. These are no radicals; they can’t find the handle on it and don’t have time to think it through. Though generalities are dangerous, one risks the judgment that always they shall vote to the last in number for the George Wallaces or Lester Maddoxes of their time; will fear God at least in the abstract and Authority and Change even more; will become shadetree mechanics, factory robots, salesmen of small parts, peace-time soldiers or sailors; random serfs. (Yes, good neighbors, do you know what it is to envy the man who no longer carries the dinner bucket, and hope that someday you’ll reach his plateau: maybe sell for Allstate?) The women of such men are beauticians and waitresses and laundry workers and pregnant. Their children may be hauled in pickup trucks or old Fords dangling baby booties, furry dice, plastic saints. Or be plastered with bumper stickers: Honk If You Love Jesus, maybe, or Goat Ropers Need Love Too.
We are talking, my friends, about America’s white niggers: the left behind, the luckless, and the doomed. It is these we explore: my clay, native roots, mutha culture . . .
I didn’t know I was a Redneck as a kid. The Housenrights were Rednecks, I knew—even though I didn’t know the term; couldn’t have defined it—and so were the Spagles and certain branches of the Halls, the Peoples, the Conines. These were the raggedest of the ragged; there was a hopelessness about them, a wildness possible only in the surrendered, a community sense that their daddies didn’t try as hard as some or, simply, had been born to such ill luck, silly judgments, whiskey thirsts, or general rowdiness as to preclude twitches of upward mobility. Such families were less likely than others to seek church; their breadwinners idled more; their children came barefoot to school even in winter. They were more likely to produce domestic violence, blood feuds, boys who fought their teachers. They no longer cared and, not caring, might cheerfully flatten or stab you in a playground fight or at one of the Saturday night country dances held in rude plank homes along the creek banks. Shiftless badasses. Poor white tacky Rednecks who did us the favor of providing somebody to look down on. For this service we children of the “better” homes rewarded them with rock fights or other torments: Dessie Hall, Dessie Hall/ Haw Haw Haw/ Your Daddy Never Bathes/ But He’s Cleaner Than Your Maw.
Ours was a reluctant civilization. Eastland County, Texas, in 1920—less than a decade before my birth—had 58,500 people; by the U.S. Census count that year, more than 46,000 of these had attained the age of ten or above without having learned to read or write in any language. Yes, you read the figures right. I recall old nesters who “made their marks” should documents require their signatures. A neighboring farmer in middle-age boasted that his sons had taught him simple long-division; on Saturdays he sat on the wooden veranda of Morgan Brothers General Store in Scranton, demonstrating on a brown paper sack exactly how many times 13 went into 39, while whiskered old farmers gathered for their small commerce looked on as intently as if he might be revealing the internal rules of Heaven.
We lived in one of the more remote nooks of Eastland County, in cotton and goober and scrub oak country. There were no paved roads and precious few tractors among that settlement of marginal farms populated by snuff-dippers, their sunbonneted women, and broods of jittery shy kids who might regard unexpected visitors from concealment. We were broken-plow farmers, holding it all together with baling wire, habit, curses, and prayers. Most families were on FDR’s “relief agency” rolls; county agriculture agents taught our parents to card their cotton by hand so they might stuff home-made mattresses. They had less success in teaching crop rotation, farmers feeling that the plot where Daddy and Grandaddy had grown cotton remained a logical place for cotton still. There were many who literally believed in a flat earth and the haunting presence of ghosts; if the county contained any individual who failed to believe that eternal damnation was a fair reward for the sinner, he never came forward to declare it.
Churches grew in wild profusion. Proud backwoodsmen, their best doctrines disputed by fellow parishioners, were quick to establish their rival rump churches under brush arbors or tabernacles or in plank cracker-boxes. One need have no formal training to preach: The Call was enough, a personal conviction that God had beckoned one from a hot cornfield to spread the Word. Converts were baptized in muddy creeks or stock tanks, some flocks—in the words of the late Uncle Earl Long of Louisiana—“chunking snakes and catching fevers.”
It was not uncommon for righteous vigilantes to pay nocturnal calls on erring wife-beaters or general ne’er-do-wells, flogging them with whips and prayers while demanding their immediate improvement. Such Godly posses did not seek to punish those who lived outside the law, however, should commerce be involved: times were hard, and so were the people. Bootleggers flourished in those woods, and even cattle thieves were ignored so long as they traveled safe distances to improve their small herds.
My father’s house was poor but proud: law-abiding, church-ridden, hard-working, pin-neat; innocent, it seems in retrospect, of conscious evil, and innocent, even, of the modern world. Certainly we had good opinions of ourselves and a worthy community standing. And yet even in that “good” family of workworn self-starting country aristocrats there were tragedies and explosions as raw as the land we inhabited: my paternal grandfather was shot to death by a neighbor; an uncle went to the pen for carnal knowledge of an under-aged girl; my father’s fists variously laid out a farmer who had the temerity to cut in front of his wagon in the cotton gin line, a ranch hand who’d reneged on a promise to pay out of his next wages for having his horse shod, a kinsman who threatened to embarrass the clan by running unsuccessfully for county commissioner a ninth straight time. My father was the family enforcer, handing out summary judgments and corporal punishments to any in the bloodline whose follies he judged trashy or a source of community scorn or ridicule. It was most tribal: Walking Bear has disgraced the Sioux; very well, off with Walking Bear’s head.
So while we may have had no more money than others, no more of education or raw opportunity, I came to believe that the Kings were somehow special. A certain deference was paid my parents in their rural domain: they gave advice, helped shape community affairs, were arbiters and unofficial judges. I became a leader at the country school and in Bethel Methodist Church, where we took pride in worships free of snake-handling or foot-washings—although it was proper to occasionally talk in tongues or grovel at the Mourner’s Bench.
I strutted when my older brother, Weldon, returned in his second hand Model-A Ford to visit from Midland. I imagined him a leading citizen there; he had found success as manager of the lunch counter and fountain at Piggly Wiggly’s and announced cowpoke melodies part-time over the facilities of Radio Station KCRS. More, he was an outfielder with the semi-professional Midland Cowboys baseball team.
Weldon epitomized sophistication in my young mind: he wore smart two-toned shoes with air holes allowing his feet to breathe, oceans of Red Rose hair oil and a thin go-to-hell mustache. In the jargon of the time and place he was “a jellybean.” Where rustics rolled their own from nickel bags of Duke’s Mixture or Country Gentleman, my brother puffed luxurious “ready rolls.” When he walked among local stay-at-homes on his rare visits, he turned the heads of milkmaids and drew the dark envied stares of male contemporaries who labored on their fathers’ farms or, if especially enterprising, had found jobs at the broom factory in Cisco. He was walking proof of the family’s industry and ambition, and he reinforced my own dreams of escape to bigger things.
Imagine my shocked surprise, then, when—in my early teens—I accompanied my family in its move to Midland city, there to discover that I was the Redneck: the bumpkin, the new boy with feedlot dung on his shoes and the funny homemade haircuts. Nobody in Midland had heard of the Kings; nor did anyone rush to embrace them. Where in the rural consolidated school I had boasted a grade average in the high 90s, in Midland the mysteries of algebra, geometry, and biology kept me clinging by my nails to scholastic survival. Where I had captained teams, I now stood uninvited on the fringes of playground games. My clothes, as good as most and better than some in Eastland County, now betrayed me as a poor clod.
I withdrew to the company of other misfits who lived in clapboard shacks or tents on the jerrybuilt South Side, wore time-faded jeans and stained teeth, cursed, fought, drank beer, and skipped school to hang around South Main Street poolhalls or domino parlors. These were East Texans, Okies, and Arkies whose parents—like mine—had starved off their native acres and had followed the war boom west. Our drawls and twangs and marginal grammar had more of the dirt farmer or drifting fruit-picker in them than of the cattleman or small merchant; our homes utilized large lard buckets as stools or chairs and such paltry art as adorned them likely showed Jesus on the cross suffering pain and a Woolworth’s framing job; at least one member of almost every family boasted its musician: guitar or banjo or mandolin pickers who cried the old songs while their instruments whined or wailed of griefs and losses in places dimly remembered.
My Library
