The Gentle One 
The Soul of East Texas
A land of tall trees and deep roots, where the past still haunts the present.
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Families in East Texas were once bound not only by blood by also by certain traditions. My relatives could sing in four-part harmony, some could play musical instruments, and almost all could tell stories. Recently I had lunch with a handsome male cousin of mine who purports to be “ninety-two damn years old,” and right there in Wyatt’s Cafeteria I got him to recite “The Ladies” from Kipling’s Ballads and Barrack Room Ballads. Every time our family gathers, certain heartily embellished stories are told or at least alluded to. The stories of “The Rattling Fork,” “The Dog on the Tilt-Top Table,” “The Day Mama Ran Away,” “Uncle Burton and the Gideon Bibles,” and the adventures of Troubador, a well-known dog-about-town who urinated on the preacher’s leg during Chigger Corley’s funeral, cannot be written down. They are theatrical performances that require raucous audience participation and may require the tale-teller to assume the countenance of a dog. My family’s penchant for irreverent theatrical behavior was thought to be inherited and therefore unavoidable. Every time one of my brother’s tales caused my Aunt Lois’s legendary torrential cackle to erupt, he was rewarded by the family’s acknowledging, “Why, young J.Q.’s got a lot of his Uncle Burton in him.” Certain strains in families are tenacious. Uncle Burton, who has been dead 35 years, was surely smiling somewhere the night my own small son, who could hardly lisp his own name, returned from a Rangers game imitating the bleacher vendors’ “Co’beah? Co’beah?” I haven’t decided yet which of my three boys will have to memorize Kipling’s “Ladies.”
Trees sheltered us, and we were embraced by our families, but our churches taught us that all was lost if we weren’t “leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” Although my roots were Presbyterian and most of the family remained there, my particular branch of the family strayed first to Methodism and finally to the First Baptist Church, the biggest church in town.
Ours was such an all-encompassing, full-service church that even in the days before Baptist bowling alleys and gymnasiums, we felt sorry for anyone who was not a Baptist. I regularly logged six or seven hours on Sunday and at least three on Wednesday night. No church made more demands on its young people or accomplished such measurable results. I was personally convicted of my wormy sinfulness and need for salvation at the age of seven. Anybody who attended church regularly and remained unbaptized by the age of nine was just not susceptible to Baptist pestering. The total-immersion baptism, which followed a profession of faith before the entire congregation, was performed in a giant fish tank set in the wall above the choir stalls. Baptismal candidates and the pastor wore white robes. The somewhat terrifying gravity of my own symbolic death and resurrection to new life was lightened a little by my watching our preacher scramble into chest waders before performing the ceremony.
Once saved (always saved), we were lovingly goaded into memorizing vast amounts of the King James Bible. The Baptist Church taught us to listen, to speak, and to pray before large audiences, to sing and to read music. We had to learn to dance and play cards on our own. Instead of slacking off in the summertime, the church doubled its efforts with vacation Bible school and choir camps held at a Baptist encampment near Daingerfield. Church camp, with its prohibition against “mixed bathing,” only heightened our awareness of sex and caused some to seek more passionate togetherness as “prayer partners” in bucolic thatched tabernacles appointed for private meditation.
Some who were brought up in the East Texas Baptist tradition remember only its hypocrisy and the burden of guilt that came from being dangled over the pit of hell on a weekly basis. My memories are more affectionate. The Baptists offered a child the security of a personal and loving God, a sense of democracy (Baptists vote on everything), and the example of dedicated people who continued to care about you and probably pray for you even if you grew up to be an Episcopalian.
The evils of racial intolerance somehow never came up in Sunday school. I spent many a Sunday afternoon with the Baptist Girls’ Auxiliary, ministering to the children of gypsies who lived in the worst poverty I’ve never witnessed. The children smelled of urine and kerosene and lived in dark tar-paper lean-tos on the edge of town. There were more-stable, less-dangerous neighborhoods of black families living in similar conditions, but we never went there. Nevertheless, we naively prided ourselves on our close personal relationships with black people. I must have rocked a thousand miles next to Pinkie Satcher’s ample bosom. Almost everyone we knew in our neighborhood of small houses had some help with the ironing and the children, which allowed lingering elements of Southern gentility. Maids polished silver, dusted cut glass, and starched tablecloths and napkins in exchange for unconscionable wages, bags of worn-out clothes, and bacon drippings. I knew the maids in my friends’ houses as well as I knew their mothers. They seated us at the front of the bus and then matter-of-factly took their seats in the back. We regarded them with an odd respect. Their hard lives gave them mysterious capabilities and folk wisdom that we didn’t have. One of my older cousins credits his very existence to a black midwife who mixed a poultice of cobwebs and cow dung to stop the hemorrhaging from his umbilical cord. When I had babies of my own, I remembered their old wives’ tales: “Don’t hold your hands over your head. You’ll strange that unborn baby on his cord. Bite that baby’s fingernails off so he won’t thieve. Don’t let him look in the mirror. It’ll make him teethe hard. Cross broom straws in his hair to cure hiccups.” We did not think much about their lives apart from ours. I noticed the thick, puffy scars across Pinkie Satcher’s chest that my older brother told me were made by a razor, but they seemed so incongruous with the loving woman who sang me to sleep with “Fly Away to Jesus” that I could never bring myself to ask what had happened.
To see East Texas clearly, I had to get away from it. For two summers of my college years I worked in Washington, D.C., for Congressman Wright Patman, whose district covered eleven counties in northeast Texas. I read and clipped news items from small-town newspapers, and I composed congratulatory letters to grimfaced couples in the district celebrating their fiftieth and sixtieth wedding anniversaries. Evenetually I also read and helped to answer stacks of mail that poured in daily. Reading those sad letters written with knife-sharpened pencil stubs in quivery script on cheap tablet paper addressed to “Dear Honorble” or “Dear Congress” or “Dear Mr. Rite” revealed a poverty and illiteracy I didn’t want to believe. “Somebody sed you cud hep me. I don’t see good and I can’t hardly work.” People wrote about their lost social security checks, their liver ailments, their no-account children, and their general despair that life could turn so bad. The last summer I worked there, 1967, I sometimes had to telephone grieving rural black women in towns like Tenaha or Bogata who had never been out of their counties and whose sons’ bodies were now being shipped home from places in the world they couldn’t imagine.
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