The Gentle One 
The Soul of East Texas
A land of tall trees and deep roots, where the past still haunts the present.
(Page 3 of 3)
When I faced the level of need in my part of the state, the conservative politics that pervaded my high school civics class—the essay contests sponsored by the Daughters of the American Revolution on the threat of socialized medicine, and the communist plots seen in every welfare payment—seemed so blatantly hypocritical. Most of the people who petitioned Patman’s office could not take care of themselves. Too often, local political powers in East Texas—narrow-minded county commissioners, sheriffs, wealthy attorneys, or judges—lacked the vision or inclination to do anything more than exploit or maintain the status quo. If the federal government did not help those down-and-out people, it seemed to me they had nowhere else to turn.
If going away from East Texas allowed me to see its people with wider eyes, it also afforded a fresh look at the natural beauty that I took for granted as a child. Driving toward Texarkana in the fall or traveling toward Marshall through Longview, I now appreciate the reds and yellows and oranges of the dense trees that line the highway. My husband and sons’ interest in fishing gives me time and places to admire bluebirds, hummingbirds, wildflowers, persimmon trees, snaky vines, odd mushrooms, and butterflies that flit in and out of dappled shade. But any foray into the lush countryside of East Texas is also likely to turn up equal parts of devastation—the sandy-bottomed creeks despoiled by salt water from oil fields or trash dumping, once-green slopes stripped for lignite coal and left rusty and eroded, dense forests replaced with commercially profitable look-alike pines, and sweet-smelling air displaced by acrid odors of paper mills. Quaint small-town squares are boarded up, their merchants unable to compete with K marts and Wal-Marts on the interstates. Preservation and conservation are luxuries enjoyed by more-prosperous, better-educated parts of the country. East Texas, struggling to keep its population employed, has never thought it could afford them.
I have to rely a lot on memory when I return to East Texas. Several years ago while visiting my parents, I took my sons to see my first neighborhood school playground. A local kid doing handstands on the splintery seesaws challenged my boys, “Them ain’t hard. Y’all oughta try it.” As if it somehow compensated for their reluctance to stand on their heads, one of my sons said to me in a stage whisper, “He speaks bad English.” After their tour of my childhood haunts, which they found altogether unimpressive, they asked, “Mom, did you used to be a hick?” My urban children growing up in an affluent, almost monolithic Dallas neighborhood have temporarily pre-sorted the world by economic status, blue-jean label, educational attainment, and hairstyle into convenient categories—hicks, punks, airheads, and the rest of us. Without so much as a “Hidy, hy’re you?” I fear that they indiscriminately lump my hometown folks right in with the worst crackers portrayed in Mississippi Burning. They lack the memory to see the people or the places properly.
I cannot re-create for them the broader, intimate exposure to all sorts of plain and fancy people that small-town East Texas gave. I look at my oldest son’s school yearbook and compare it with my own. His class has a sameness about it—all clean, healthy-looking college-bound kids with overpriced clothes, all knowing little of the world’s pain, poverty, and eccentricity that I picked up just by osmosis. Leonard, who sat behind me in the second grade, had only one eye and sometimes delighted us by taking his glass one out at recess. Linda, across the aisle, sometimes had to see the school nurse about head sores. Some kids in our class were members of the Holy Roller church that didn’t allow women to cut their hair. I daydreamed a lot about how long their hair would get before we graduated. Johnny’s arm got broken when we were in the third grade, but his parents never had it set, so it always hung a little funny. Terry, who sat in front of me in the fourth grade, stepped on a rusty can, and because she had had no tetanus shot, she died of lockjaw. There was little fancy diagnostic testing then. Kids who now would be siphoned off into special education muddled right along with the rest of us. Through the years tough kids with names like Bubba or Butch, with lopsided ears, missing permanent teeth, uncorrected crossed eyes, kids who would never shed “hisself” as a pronoun or “he done it” as an accusation, became as much a part of the taken-for-granted landscape of my childhood as the young Dillard’s-department-store heir whose chauffeur drove us to country-club birthday parties. If in my college years I began to value philosophers more than plumbers, the balance was restored at my tenth high school reunion. I was eight months pregnant with my second child and could have been voted “most changed.” A former high school football hero, whom I had tutored in English grammar, asked me to dance. Assessing my prominent belly, I lumbered out of the folding chair, smiled, and said, “David, you’re awfully kind to ask, but you can’t be serious.” “Sure, I am,” he said. “I’m a butcher over at Safeway now, and I’m used to movin’ big slabs of meat around.”
My children giggle at the beauty-shop sign “Chic Le Doll” as we turn down a street we always called Boulevard. I never had my hair done there, but seeing the sign recalls hours spent in small front-room shops that we called beauty parlors. Getting a permanent was an all-day affair, and in the course of the day an attentive child could hear enough bizarre gossip to frighten her out of ever growing up at all. I remember puzzling for weeks over the conversation about “twisted ovaries” and how Juanelle “broke her water” right there on the kitchen floor before J.T. could get her to the hospital. I never found that soap operas could compete.
My boys see only the broken-out windows and transients lounging in the lobby of the old downtown Grim Hotel, but I remember meeting former president Harry Truman there and my father’s glamorous stories of dancing in the roof garden to Ted Weem’s orchestra. My children see a defunct boarded-up Union Station with pigeons roosting near a clock that stopped maybe twenty years ago. But I hear whistles and deep-voiced stationmasters calling “All aboard” for Nash, Leary, New Boston, De Kalb, Clarksville, and Paris, and somewhere in my memory is the statistic that 27 passenger trains once came through my town daily. I visit aging neighbors to whom I am still a little girl, and my boys squirm with boredom. My children can’t fathom how many people took a hand in my upbringing in a small town. There was no escape to anonymity.
East Texas has a mysterious hold on those of us who grew up there. In its flickering shade and light, it simultaneously revealed some truths and obscured others. We are left with paradoxes we cannot reconcile. How do I explain the love of language and a good story, the rural black speech rich with biblical “reaping and sowing and chastising,” and the relatives who once recited Tennyson, all coexisting with illiteracy and ambivalence about education? A music store in Dallas once ran a September special offering a shotgun with each piano purchase, an odd pairing of gentleness and violence that does not surprise an East Texan. In my childhood the genteel old lady in my neighborhood might be known for her wonderful heart and extreme generosity, but she could turn from hugging me and say to her black maid, “I thought I told you that I never wanted to see your black butt decorating this front porch.” Seeing gracious mansions bulldozed to make way for a hamburger stand, or a canopy of trees cut to widen a street near a dying downtown, leaves us with humbled notions about man’s wisdom. Is it any wonder that I still hum hymns when I do the dishes and that I was greatly relieved when a woman who heard me speak said, “Honey, I can just tell you’re anchored in the Lord.”
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