Cities
Hanging in Hemphill
When my mother moved to deep East Texas, I wasn’t surprised to hear her describe her new neighbors as colorful—but she never told me about the gallows.
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“The secret here of getting along is to mind your business and ride the fence rail and don’t take either side,” mused Grover Winslow—for most of the past 42 years Hemphill’s lone physician—as he lazily twirled his stethoscope. “People here are a different breed of people from any place you’ve ever been. This was no man’s land for years up and down the Sabine River. In fact, my father’s oldest brother’s wife’s brother killed a man back in Alabama and came over here. Then there was a fellow here by the name of Bill Stanley—his father was a federal judge in Mississippi. He killed a man and got off in this jungle where nobody would bother him.”
Will Smith, a Church of Christ pastor who is the county’s first black commissioner, made it clear that he had moved to Hemphill because of its balm-of-Gilead possibilities. “Most people have heard only the bad things. But those with positive minds are going to overcome those with negative minds. When you look at me, you can see the change. No one would ever expect a black man to become a commissioner. That’s hope. When you look at Willie, you look at hope. I’m here for good. I already have my grave site picked out. I’m leaving my body in Hemphill and trying my best to help my soul go off to heaven.”
Smith’s comments run counter to the commonly held idea, fueled by the trouble in Vidor a few years back, that blacks and whites cannot coexist comfortably in East Texas. Not that there haven’t been moments that make you wonder: In 1990 two Hemphill lawmen were convicted of beating to death a black Louisiana man in their custody. But most of the people I talked to suggested that race isn’t really an issue. Certainly that was the sense I got when my mother and I paid a surprise visit to Hivie and Leamon McCowan, an older black couple she had met at a Lion’s Club dinner. Mrs. McCowan gave me a hug as we were introduced and, within seconds of ushering me inside her house, a plate of cake still warm from the oven.
“Do you mind telling me how old you are?” I asked Mr. McCowan.
“I thank the good Lord for blessing me to get where I am,” he replied, looking content in his blue overalls. “I done passed four score by two years.”
“How do you like living in Hemphill?”
“I must like it pretty good,” Mr. McCowan said with a grin, “’cause I been here fifty-three years.”
“What kind of work did you do as a younger man?”
“You name it, I did it. I cut logs for twenty-three years. I used a six-foot crosscut saw, man on each end of it. I never cut less than one hundred and forty logs a day. One day I remember working with a white man, and we knocked down two hundred and ninety-three logs.” I glanced at his wife for confirmation. She nodded.
“Has living in Hemphill ever been tough for you?”
Mrs. McCowan spoke up first. “Kinda. There was a lot of prejudice here. I remember times when we had to go into the back of a cafe, and if we wanted to use the restroom, they would turn us down, you know, as blacks. But that was probably true of all the communities in East Texas. In the fifties I worked in the courthouse, and you know, they was nice to me.”
Mr. McCowan suddenly started in about local politics. “Best judge we had since I been here, and they got shed of him.” Mrs. McCowan frowned at her husband. “Why you looking at me?” he said. “That’s the truth.”
The dust kicked up from years of small-town politicking has apparently settled over just about everyone in Hemphill. When I went by the courthouse to see justice of the peace Thomas Hamilton—the mayor’s elder brother—he tucked his thumbs under his red suspenders and held forth on, among politically charged topics, a game warden whose “house burned up after he caught these old boys running deer with their dogs” and the “hatchet job” several city officials had received from a local newspaper. He then tore into his brother’s chief opponent in the upcoming mayoral race, 44-year-old Ed Farrell, a self-proclaimed “cardiac surgeon” turned newspaper publisher. Judge Hamilton pulled out a small black book from which he read a list of people who, he said, had won legal settlements against Farrell, though he didn’t specify for what.
In an office around the corner, Farrell paced behind his enormous desk looking a bit like a caricature of Huey Long: pear shaped, puffing a kielbasa-size El Rey Del Mundo cigar, dressed in an expensive-looking silver-gray suit. As he sermonized about civic responsibility, I held in my lap a copy of that week’s Sabine County Times, the weekly paper he founded in February, around the same time that he entered the mayor’s race. “I came back to Hemphill because what I was doing wasn’t a challenge,” he said. “When I started working in cardiac surgery, when I started training in cardiac surgery, it was extremely exciting. I did a good bit of medical writing, wrote some books and a good many articles. For a young fellow, it’s a real ego-building experience to stand in front of a thousand people and make a talk and have them all listen to you—it was a challenge.”
“Now, were you performing heart surgery?” I asked.
“The process of training—I mean, they don’t just cut you loose doing surgery until everybody feels secure on the notion that you know what you’re doing. That’s why it takes seven years. You go from being a guy that holds the retractors to a guy that holds the sutures to a guy that puts the sutures in. We’ve been training surgeons in the U.S. that way since the 1880’s. It’s a successful system. The capacity in which you participate in surgery changes as a function of how long you’ve been at it. Anyway, I enjoy a challenge.”
“So are you a cardiologist?”
He paused. “I was a cardiac surgeon.”
I wrote on my notepad and then read aloud, “An M.D. A cardiac surgeon.”
“You keep reiterating that,” he said. “Do you find that remarkable?”
My final morning in Hemphill I was awakened around seven (a fact even more remarkable than Mr. Farrell’s medical career) by my mother chatting with friends on the phone; in these parts, apparently, the day is well under way by sunrise. But what a lovely sunrise it proved to be: Hanging there above the Louisiana shoreline, the morning sun blossomed slowly across a bloodshot Texas sky as a cool breeze blew over the lake. I stood barefoot on the pier, thinking about the peculiarities of what I had observed, and I concluded that an accurate portrait of Hemphill—or probably any deep East Texas town—can’t be managed with simple black and white strokes. Who really knows whether the old jailhouse gallows is a metaphorical cross for the religion of punishment or just some strange beacon in the wilderness for outlaws, backwater politicians, and retired secretaries from Houston?
I glanced back at my mother’s home. A lone heron flew up to the boughs of one of the fifty-foot pines surrounding the shoreline. There was no noise from the lake. And—at least until I departed—not a neighbor in sight.
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