The Final Gun
In a small town deep in the Big Thicket a coach and a principal loved the same woman. Their rivalry ended after...
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Walter Senior was a stern and dominant figure in the Creole community. For more than thirty years he was the symbol of black education in the school district, an advocate of what moderns would call an Uncle Tom philosophy. Hurley remembers that his father constantly admonished his children and his students to accept their station in life. “He’d tell us that you never see robins with mockingbirds,” Hurley says. “Now that I’m older I can see what he meant.” The speaking of French was discouraged in Walter Senior’s home. That was a hollow exercise in discipline, since his children spent their summers with French-speaking relatives in Lawtell, Louisiana.
Growing up in a Creole community in the Big Thicket must have been a schizophrenic experience, especially before integration. “It caused some emotional scars,” Walter Junior admits. “We were colored, so we had to sit in a special section at restaurants and in the balcony at the movie house in Daisetta. But we weren’t black either. We were French-speaking Catholics, and the blacks didn’t want anything to do with us.” Hurley remembers that when blacks rode into the Big Thicket boomtown of Saratoga—usually on a logging truck, few if any blacks were allowed to work for oil companies—they were greeted by a sign warning, “Nigger, don’t let the sun set on your head.” There was a barrel in Saratoga called the laughing barrel, and blacks who felt themselves in danger of laughing were required to stick their heads in it. To this day, Saratoga prides itself on being all white, but Walter Junior observes, “There are blacks in Saratoga and many other places masquerading as whites.”
Some of the Fontenots had moved far enough away from Liberty County that their race had ceased to be a factor; they were white and that was that. Those who stayed were sometimes hypersensitive. A merchant in Hull who employed a young man from the Fontenot family says, “He’s lighter than I am. He has blue eyes and black wavy hair. But he’s so sensitive about dark skin that he wears number fifteen sunscreen.”
A glance at tax records or even a phonebook in Liberty County reflects the French heritage but not the racial or social disparities. There are many Fontenots, for example, most of them black, and there are many more Fregias, most of them white; the class distinction in Liberty County cannot be understood in simple terms of black and white. A wealthy white woman in Hull explains, “We have four classes of people here: the black blacks, the yellow blacks, the [she named five large lower-middle-class white families], and those of us who aren’t.”
When Hurley Fontenot graduated with honors from Prairie View A&M in 1957 and accepted an ROTC commission as a second lieutenant, the Army had already integrated. He remembers his military career fondly, especially the way he was able to walk in the front door of any hotel or restaurant. Since he was fluent in French, part of his military career consisted of escort duty with Vietnamese officers. Later, he taught chemical and biological warfare. Colleagues note that even now Hurley conducts himself in a military manner and is careful to distinguish rank and chain of command.
For seventeen years Hurley taught vocational agriculture, first at Woodson High and after integration at Hull-Daisetta High. He was a popular teacher and, like his father, a strong leader. Hurley had known since his days in the seventh grade that he wanted to be an ag teacher. “I was a runt who couldn’t make it in sports,” he says. “Agriculture was my way of exercising leadership.”
Hurley had a drinking problem, and in the late seventies the problem threatened his teaching career. He showed up drunk at FFA meetings and wrecked the ag department truck, which had been donated by a dealer in Liberty. Some school board members wanted him fired, but his cousin, Alfred Fontenot, one of two black members of the board, intervened. Instead of firing Hurley, they promoted him to principal of the junior school. The promotion felt like a demotion to Hurley. “I felt like crying,” he said. Nevertheless, he gave up drinking and accepted the position a few months later; he says he hasn’t touched a drop since January 1981.
In his four years at the junior school, Hurley never completely adjusted or felt comfortable. A principal is expected to be not only the chief executive officer of a school, he is expected to be the enforcer.” I felt like a dictator, a whipper,” he said. “In seventeen years as an ag teacher, I used corporal punishment four times. In my first four years as a principal the number was four hundred plus.”
In August 1982, at age 45, he suffered a heart attack, and the following November he underwent open heart surgery. A stomach problem that hadn’t bothered him since his days in the military flared up again. He had constant financial problems and borrowed money, or tried to, from a number of people in the district. His only recreation was attending the horse races at Delta Downs in Vinton, Louisiana, where his cousin Alfred was well known as a horse trainer. He bet heavily. Sometimes he was accompanied at the races by his clerk, Laura Nugent. In November 1982 his marriage ended in divorce.
Hurley Fontenot kept denying it, but everyone knew he was carrying on with Laura. “We’d see Hurley’s truck go by regularly, headed north toward where she lived with her mama and daddy,” recalls school board member Anne Richardson, who with her husband operated the hardware store in Hull. “When the superintendent asked him about it, he said he was just going out there to get some peas. In January? Who grows peas in January?”
At the start of the 1983-84 school year, a new coach was added to the junior school staff. His name was Billy Mac Fleming, and he was a hit with students and staff alike. The mother of two teen-agers described him as a real hunk.
Middle-Age Crazies
Bill Fleming was a star athlete at Galena Park High School in the late sixties, and he never got sports out of his system. He played freshman football and varsity baseball at Rice, but he couldn’t make the grade either athletically or academically. After two years he quit. He married his first wife, Ann, and they moved to Nacogdoches, where they both worked and attended Stephen F. Austin State University.
Though Fleming had started out to be a stockbroker, he changed his mind and majored in agriculture. He wanted to be an ag teacher, but, as things worked out, most of the jobs available in East Texas were in coaching. So he coached and taught science and math at Corrigan, Hempstead, Anahuac, and finally Hull-Daisetta. His first marriage ended after eight years, and less than a year later he married his second wife, Linda, a middle school English teacher.
“He loved agriculture,” Linda says, “but he couldn’t teach ag and still coach. He could grow anything. He could fix anything. He was a fantastic dancer. He could pick up a new dance step instantly. He was just a natural athlete. He was the home-run hitter of his Houston softball team when we lived in Anahuac, and they won all sorts of tournaments and trophies.”
Fleming had worked his way through Stephen F. Austin by laying carpet, and after the 1981-82 school year at Anahuac he quit coaching and joined his longtime friend Douglas Duncan in a carpet business in Channel view. Duncan was apparently something of a free spirit and a mystery even to people who had known him for years. “He always seemed to have a lot of extra money,” Linda remembers. Bill Fleming was worried that maybe Duncan was mixed up in something. In the summer of 1982 the carpet store burned, and seven months after that Duncan disappeared.
Fleming decided to return to coaching in the spring of 1983. They moved to Hull-Daisetta, but Linda kept her job at Barbers Hill Middle School in Mont Belvieu, southwest of Liberty. Bill didn’t talk much about his own job, but Linda gradually realized that he wasn’t altogether happy. A lot of the disciplinary problems that should have been handled by the principal were being dumped on the coach, or that was how it looked to Fleming.
“Bill had a weak personality,” Linda says. “He wanted everyone to like him. He would do more than his share, anything to keep from making waves. But he really felt like Hurley Fontenot was getting on his case.”
An incident in the summer of 1984 seemed to foreshadow the terrible things ahead. About $2000 was stolen from the office at the junior school, and some pages were tom from a receipt book. The principal, the coach, and several others, including Laura Nugent, were called before the school board. Superintendent Voytek suspected Fontenot, who, the superintendent says, had been “gambling, womanizing, writing hot checks.” But the mystery of the missing cash was never solved.
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