The Endless Odyssey of Patrick Henry Polk
The Wanderings of a Texas family on the road to nowhere.
(Page 3 of 9)
“I think one reason our welfare rolls are declining is it’s easier to get a job in Texas than in most other states,” says John Frannea, chief of management assistance at the Department of Public Welfare. “They don’t pay very much, but you can get them. It’s not the purpose of DPW to compete with the job market—nobody wants that—but we’re not even close.” Frannea points out that 80 per cent of those being added to welfare rolls are coming on for the first time. On average, a welfare family drops from the rolls after eleven months. “There are few recidivists,” Frannea adds. “What this means is that once you’ve had the experience [of welfare], you don’t want it again. There’s not much to come back to.” Dr. Victor Bach, an expert on urban studies at UT-Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs, is even more blunt: “The reason there is a low welfare fraud rate in Texas is because it doesn’t pay even if you get away with it.”
In light of the 56 per cent inflation since 1969, the DPW recommended that the current Legislature increase daily AFDC payments from $1 to $1.23—or about $7 a month for each member of the family. The Legislature Budget Board, composed of the Speaker of the House, the Lieutenant Governor, and eight ranking members of the Legislature, rejected the request. With Dolph Briscoe also four-square against it, there seems little chance the increase will be approved.
THE LONG WAIT
It was the middle of January, and the Polks still hadn’t received their welfare check. Henry was getting cabin fever. There was nothing to do with his hands and no way to explain, much less stop, the grinding of time. He had become a statistic. While the kids watched the fuzzy old black-and-white TV set rented from the Seven-Eleven, and mama worked the sewing machine altering hand-me-down jeans and shirts, Henry cut little windows in a piece of cardboard and rolled it into a tube. “What’s that, daddy?” Debby Sue asked. “Nothing,” he said forlornly, tossing it aside.
“The worst thing I ever did was sell that chain saw,” he said.
“Now daddy, don’t talk like that,” Cynthia said. “We needed the money. ‘Sides, that kinda work would kill you now.”
“When you get sick,” he said, “that’s the end of the hump.”
Henry remembered that his daddy used to make chairs of green willow and lariats of binder’s twine. Henry was thinking of getting himself some binder’s twine. Maybe he’d look around for some green willow, though he hadn’t seen much willow since they cut the MoPac Expressway through Clarksville. Most of the cedar was gone, too. His daddy had a stationary buzz saw, powered by running a belt around the rear wheel of a ’33 Ford, and Henry remembered how they used to pile overlapping layers of cedar posts in a mound, cover the mound with sod and cook it slowly until they had charcoal. They would use the sawdust for fertilizer, and the kids would sell the charcoal from door to door. They hunted coons and rabbits in what would later be called Tarrytown, now a quiet neighborhood of large homes and walled estates. There was always something to do, something to hope for. There were stories of Comanche gold hidden in the caves along the Colorado River, and Henry’s daddy claimed there were nine jackloads of Mexican silver buried near the Old Confederates Home, which stood on the southern edge of Clarksville.
Although Clarksville had started as a settlement for newly freed slaves, many poor white families had come later, and by the time Henry and his brothers, sisters, and cousins were growing up, the community was comfortably integrated, making it unique in Austin and probably anywhere else in Texas. “We played and fought with the niggers just like they was our own,” Henry said. “There was two old ex-slave ladies, Aunt Eady and Aunt Jenny Moe, lived just down the street from our place. My daddy used to make us call all old folks uncle or aunt no matter what color they was. He said it didn’t sound right to call ’em mister or missus. It was unrespectful.” In the evenings they used to sit under the large live oak in front of Aunt Eady’s frame shanty, which was about the same size and construction as their own place down the block. Aunt Eady would tell about the time of slavery, and about her white folks’ pet parrot that would rat on her when she would sneak food from the kitchen or neglect her chores.
“When her white people would leave the house they’d let this parrot out of his cage so he could foller Aunt Eady around and tell on her, then when they come home they’d whup her. But one time they forgot. They left the ol’ parrot caged up where the nigger could reach him. ‘Nigger gonna get rid of ol’ polly parrot,’ Aunt Eady said, and the parrot started crying, ‘Oh, please, nigger, don’t!’ But Aunt Eady taken the parrot and socked him in a pot of boiling water, then put him back in the cage like nothing happened, and she never got no more whuppings.”
Obie Polk, Henry’s older brother, would sometimes drop by the house in South Austin; and—when he wasn’t working—so would their cousin, Jake Polk. While Cynthia and the two oldest girls cooked, the men would sit around the kitchen table playing forty-two and talking and drinking strong black coffee. As a young man, Henry had done his share of hooting and drinking—the self-administered tattoo of a spraddle-legged naked woman on his left biceps was a living souvenir of one AWOL bender thirty years ago—but now he was pretty much limited to coffee and cigarettes. He wouldn’t want this to get back to his old lady, Henry said in a low voice across the table, but having intercourse, or even urinating, “hurts like somebody cut you between the legs with a hot knife.” Doctors at Audie Murphy Veterans Hospital in San Antonio had removed a malignancy from his left testicle two years ago. “They said they cut out the cancer,” Henry said,” but I think they just spread it around.” Cynthia knew about the claw, of course, but the hot knife in his scrotum was a secret Henry intended to keep among the men. The men nodded. They understood these things. It was like when Cynthia’s younger sister’s husband put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger: the men swore it was an accident, even though everyone knew he was dying from cancer.
Jake Polk, who was in his late fifties, earned his living digging, hauling, and laying rocks. He was a rock mason, as opposed to a rock cobbler. “The difference is, a rock mason has to know what he’s doing,” Jake explained. Henry also took pride in the fact he was a rock mason and regretted that he hadn’t gone on to be a brick mason. For reasons that were not clear, Henry never mastered brick masonry. “But there’s none better at rocks,” he said. “All I gotta do is hang a string from each corner and get after it.” Obie Polk, who was two years older than Henry, had never mastered rock or even learned to figure square feet and so was something of an outcast. Obie suffered from emphysema and chronic bronchitis and hadn’t worked since he loaded watermelons in Weatherford last summer. Obie was a tall, very skinny scarecrow of a man who would have been in a veteran’s hospital except for the misfortune of having deserted the Army in 1945. Since Obie had no children to qualify for welfare, he ate and slept wherever he could.
Of the three men at the kitchen table, only Jake Polk was physically able to hold a steady job and now that it was the dead of winter even Jake was idle. So they spent the long afternoons around Henry’s kitchen table, talking about rock, about where to buy a rebuilt carburetor, about what they hated most in the Army was saluting, and about mistakes in judgment that might explain their dilemma. Jake remembered the old black man who used to sit on the steps of the Sweet Home Baptist Church and ramble for hours about how someday there would be an expressway right through Clarksville. It would be years before they got around to building MoPac, but the old black man was right about it coming. In time the city would appraise the land in MoPac’s projected path at $2000 a lot, peanuts compared to its potential worth. Maybe if Henry’s daddy had sold out in time. But he didn’t. “The city come and took our homestead for $640 back taxes,” Henry said. “Somebody got rich, but it sure wasn’t us.”
I had been around the Polks for more than a week now, and the hard luck stories had become routine. It wasn’t just Henry and his brood: there were brothers, sisters, cousins, in-laws so numerous I couldn’t count much less record them, and almost every one of them was a medical and social disaster. When they weren’t talking about money they didn’t have or hospitals that wouldn’t have them, they talked about cancer and bleeding sores and broken hearts and faulty transmissions and relief checks that were nonexistent. When I first knew him, Henry Polk couldn’t bring himself to say the word welfare—he called the DPW “those people down there”—but by now the family accepted my presence and even seemed to share a measure of relief that someone from the outside was there to listen. I gradually came to see them as a tribe, a class of people who had never joined mainstream culture or had the least desire to. They were almost all cedar choppers and/or rock masons. They worked for cash or sometimes for the cedar itself, which they would sell after clearing land for some developer. They had never belonged to a union or paid Social Security or graduated from a school or had a title. They had never voted, and some of them had never thought of filing an income tax return.
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