Category Archives: Texas

annus mirabilis: facing east and west

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I have promised a memoir. Here is the opening chapter as it exists today.

I begin this narrative in June, 2020. Around me the COVID-19 pandemic rages even though our Republican governor has now declared Missouri officially reopened. I remain housebound amidst the collapse of my country around a failed leadership that may mark our decline into a new fascism. More hopefully, just across the street last evening, some of my fellow citizens waved signs emblazoned with the Black Lives Matter legend at passing cars and elicited a round of solidarity honks through the evening. I opened the front door and waved for a while.

The house I now occupy with my beloved, my son, and a dog named Maxie sits on the west side of Compton Avenue in Saint Louis and thus faces east towards the Mississippi about three miles away, though you can’t get there as the crow flies. The Gateway Arch is not visible from here, but it comes into view a half mile or so up the street as the Compton Avenue viaduct rises across old and new railroad tracks and structures, some derelict, some new, beneath it on the way to midtown. Of the Arch and its designer, Eero Sarinen, Daniel Richter opined in a 2003 book entitled Facing East from Indian Country:

Sarinen intended his monument to be viewed from the opposite direction, facing west, from the Illinois side of the river. But unless they can walk on water, all who actually visit must approach it the way I looked through it, facing east.

Pace Daniel Richter, the Arch can be viewed from many places on the Illinois side of the Mississippi. It greets travelers from the east somewhere around Cahokia, superimposed upon the cityscape. An ongoing redevelopment of the Gateway Arch National Park includes both sides of the river, but since 2009 it has been possible to view the Arch from Malcolm W. Martin Memorial Park, a 33 acre park on the East St. Louis riverfront. Popular riverboat and helicopter rides made it unnecessary to walk on water to view the Arch from many eastern perspectives even as far back as 2003. Moreover, there exists a vantage point on the Missouri side of the river from which one can look west through the Arch and see the Dred Scott courthouse framed in it up a long grassy slope, which vista was part of Sarinen’s original conception. To one marooned, as I think I am, in my house at this time when all seem to agree that some dreadful reckoning is happening around us, the Arch seems to stand for the fearful ironies of that reckoning.

For the Arch’s symbolism has always been at least double, open as it is to the rising sun and all that betokens in a city whose church steeples still prick the morning sky, almost more numerous than the skyscrapers that rise behind them, all their altars facing east. A priest friend once expressed pride of place by telling me that Saint Louis is a Catholic town. That could be seen at the time in a piece of sculpture on the Saint Louis University campus depicting a Jesuit father holding a cross like a weapon over the head of a stock figure native American whilst conferring upon him all the blessings of Catholic Christianity. That sculpture has since been removed to a Jesuit museum, a reminder that its symbolism even in its own time was already decadent. But the Arch also faces west and evokes the decades of land hungry white colonizers who set out from Saint Louis, some by land along the Santa Fe trail with its links to the Mormon and California trails, some following Louis and Clark along the Missouri river to Independence from whence they followed the Oregon trail to the Pacific northwest. We used to call these colonizers settlers, but that term carries with it too much of the canard that the west was unsettled, empty of inhabitants, that accompanied the old myths of manifest destiny.
The east side of the river, too, what eventually became the city of East Saint Louis, has its own history as both a terminus and a beginning, home to railroads, steel, aluminum, and meat packing enterprises over the years, to name a few. Like Saint Louis, Illinoistown, as it was first known, has been home to series of in-migrations as various immigrant groups came to work in its industries. East Saint Louis, like the city across the river, was one destination for the great migration of African Americans after 1910 and was the site of one of the nation’s fiercest race riots in 1917. Estimates of African Americans killed are disputed still and range between 39 and 250.

But I’ll write about Saint Louis only glancingly because I’m not qualified to do more; I didn’t go to high school here; being able to claim a Saint Louis high school is the chief mark of the native in this place, though Saint Louis is no less my home for all that. I’ve chosen Saint Louis’s answer to the Statue of Liberty as a beginning point for my own journey because, though my own life has faced mostly westward, it has its own eastward face. I spent fifteen years of that life making my home in North Carolina, for instance. But my personal impulse to make a home in the east likely began when I left West Texas to attend college at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Dallas being about as far away from West Texas as I was brave enough to attempt at first. Later, I attended graduate schools at Duke and UNC Chapel Hill, thinking like the southwestern boy I still was in those days, that the intellectual center of my country was to the east of wherever I was. My intellectual journey in those days produced a strange animal whose learning was in some crucial sense grafted on. It wasn’t mine. It took me many years after I left North Carolina to make it so.

What could be called a typical American life? certainly not one so discontinuous as mine has been. But only recently I’ve become aware of a personal need to reconcile myself to the fact that I have lived a life of inherited privilege stemming from both of my country’s original sins. Perhaps in this I differ but little from all other white Americans, but I’ve never thought of myself as privileged. In fact, if I’m honest with myself I’ve mostly thought of myself as inferior to the more learned, to the Doctors and Professors who have been my tutors and often my colleagues. But I have a direct familial connection to slavery through my mother’s family, to the overturning of reconstruction in the south by the Ku Klux Klan and a generation of “redemption” politicians of whom my mother’s great grandfather was one (“redemption” encompassing lynching with all its phenomenology of horror). I grew up in the Jim Crow era in a town more southern than not, in a family more southern than not. But I have been reintroduced in recent years, as I have done some research into my father’s family history, to the fact that I have a direct familial connection to what we used to call Indian removal. My father’s people migrated into western Oklahoma in the last days of the Oklahoma land rush.

In part this awareness stems from a course on dismantling racism sponsored by my church, for which I traveled to Iowa City and spent the better part of a week wrestling with the full-blown dawning of something many of my colleagues in the faith at the time couldn’t find it in their hearts to admit to themselves. That was 2006. Since that year I have ‘sidled up’ as we say in West Texas, to direct confrontation with the fact of white privilege. It does me no good to protest that I had nothing to do with my country’s past. I have been forced to understand that my life has been sheltered and fostered by an inherited privilege conferred upon me by no merit other than the accident of my white skin (which isn’t white except by contrast with the skin tones of people of color). What am I to make of this now, especially since ‘wokeness’ has well-nigh become a cult amongst parts of the white establishment. Some will think me arrogant to claim such an ambivalence. So set it down here that I recognize my privilege and the arrogance of my privileged recognition, but I also realize these involve me in an endless loop of ambivalence that has no end in the realm of practical reason.

My father’s death in the second world war remains a primary datum for me, though I have now outlived him by fifty years and more. I don’t think my mother ever quite recovered from the loss, and that may be one reason for my own inability to dismiss it, though I have recently been reminded that my father’s kin share that inability with me. For a long time I had lost contact with my father’s family, but recently that contact has been renewed no thanks to me, by cousins of mine whose lives stem from Guam (more about that later). Just this Memorial Day weekend I talked on the phone for an hour or more with a cousin who now lives in Los Angeles and called to wish me well on Memorial Day. My heart jerked as I first heard her voice, an acknowledgement of the distance between us, more to be explained by the radical discontinuity in our family history than by physical distance. I have a collection of my father’s correspondence with my mother and other letters pertaining to his death. I have read some of it and propose to myself the task of reading the rest before I die. But I will not read what remains of their correspondence now, primarily because, as long as I am engaged in this work of memory I don’t want to risk losing or altering my lifetime’s sense of my father’s absence, which still broods over my conception of the order of things.

Like many of my fellow citizens I’m suffering from something like information overload this year, though it isn’t exactly that. It’s more like Mrs. Moore’s spiritual muddle in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, in which history, temperament, old age, political consciousness, metaphysical uncertainty, all seem to conspire to suggest a profound anomaly, to wit: the world has changed unalterably and become unrecognizable; and simultaneously, the world hardly ever changes—it is I who have changed.

She had come to that state where the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at the same time—the twilight of the double vision in which so many elderly people are involved. If this world is not to our taste, well, at all events, there is Heaven, Hell, Annihilation—one or other of those large things, that huge scenic background of stars, fires, blue or black air. All heroic endeavour, and all that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that the world is all. But in the twilight of the double vision, a spiritual muddledom is set up for which no high-sounding words can be found; we can neither act nor refrain from action, we can neither ignore nor respect Infinity.

My condition isn’t hopeless, as I think Forster thought Mrs. Moore’s condition to be, but it places before me a complex of questions, drops them on my plate like Proufrock’s works and days of hands. What may yet be done? What may it still be possible to think? How shall I bear myself towards a world that more and more seems to be characterized by irreconcilable disputes and wrongs without remedy? And somewhat less urgently, though equally relevant to my present condition, how shall I bear myself towards the prospect of my own unbeing?

I am an intuitive person. My thinking life—note that I don’t say intellectual life; that’s something else—has proceeded by fits and starts. I am seldom aware of the major movements of my mind until they are well begun. I approach them in medias res. I am, moreover, a literary person. What I know of what has been thought and said in my language, and to some lesser extent in a few other languages, opens resonant spaces in my thinking, supplies me with the fundamental categories of what I have learned from Richard Rorty to call my final vocabulary, though perhaps not all of its categories. As a result, thinking is for me an exploration and a sounding of those resonant spaces in hopeful anticipation of occasional release into more nearly original space. Original to myself, of course; I long ago understood that I arrive at new places in my thinking only to realize that others have been there before me. I cherish the hope as well that my literariness is not mere pedantry or belleletrism; albeit, it is so much a part of my nature now that I can hardly hope to escape it.

Back to Mrs. Moore, whose untimely death occurs as an anti-resolution of the primary conflict of Forster’s novel. The muddle that does her in contains elements that resemble some of the dilemmas of postmodern times. She is a woman with advanced ideas, able to befriend Dr. Aziz, the novel’s Muslim Indian protagonist, resistant to the bigotry of other British characters for whom the Raj is a projection of the falsehood of Anglo superiority. She is also religiously unprejudiced, able to find God in the mosque where she first meets Aziz. Her own Passage to India, the combination of culture shock (symbolized by the echo in the Marabar caves), old age, the loss and grief contingent upon various personal betrayals, and perhaps simple exhaustion, proves too much for her, overcomes what might have been a heroic spirit. Before her death she is unable to help Aziz in his trouble, though she is certain of his innocence, perhaps partly because it is her friend, Adela Quested, who has accused Aziz of sexual assault.

Like Mrs. Moore I’m unable to defeat my own muddle or to rise above it. In fact I don’t wish to do either thing. Not religion nor ideology nor my social grounding offers me meaningful triumph, consolation, or even escape. But unlike Mrs. Moore I am unwilling (and I stress that word) to drift away into a fog of anomie. What I seek is to find the center of my muddle and to take up a position there. Like Wendell Berry I believe that the center is a position rather than an abdication. What I have begun in this essay, and will continue to do in subsequent essays, is attempt to address matters that are contingent upon my having taken it up as well as being immanent in my thinking life and in my memories. As Montaigne wrote, “To philosophize is to learn to die”; or to paraphrase Berry in a different context, I seek to prepare myself for a world in which I will be dead, but not to avoid living as meaningfully as I am able all the way out to the end of whatever there is.

My main title comes from a poem by John Dryden, published in 1667, that created a fashion for naming years in which humankind was stricken with catastrophe. 1666 had been a plague year. Dryden had left London in order to escape the plague, but his poem celebrates both the disastrous great fire of London that took place that same year and a few English sea victories that are less remarkable. Though he called his poem “annus mirabilis” or “year of Wonders,” he seems not to have regarded the plague he escaped as a wonder. But the fact of the plague has associated itself with that name over the years. Geraldine Brooks’s fine novel Year of Wonders, explores the effect of the plague on a small English village whose citizens collectively decide to isolate themselves in order to protect others.

It’s that sort of reckoning that’s going on around us now. These essays record my own process of coming to terms with that reckoning and my part in it. We’ve become accustomed to hearing that our time is a perfect storm, combining a pandemic with economic and political collapse on a scale we have never seen before in American life and a rising popular demand for police reform. As if these weren’t enough, behind them all looms the threat of environmental disaster. And I add now that my own experience has combined aging with a series of personal health crises that have complicated my sense of the acute peril we face. At the end of my life, I find that I have become an American Midwesterner, one of a series of reinventions of myself that have spanned the time since my early boyhood in New Mexico. When I retired for the second time in 2016, I wrote as follows about living in Saint Louis:

“I guess I’m trying to school myself to think of old age as an invitation not to design an immortality strategy but still to live with as much gusto as I can muster for the remaining time I have. I’m aware of my huge good fortune in possessing good health, though I need to take off a few pounds (actually more than a few). So my prescription for myself is contingent upon continued good health and therefore is for myself alone; though you’re welcome to stop by, if you like. We can have a coffee at Mokabes or a beer at The Shaved Duck if it’s late enough in the day, and talk about whatever’s in the air.

“I think I may be reconciled to living in the city I have in the here and now, not in another one to come (pace Plato and St. Paul). The Academy was in some ways my city to come, to be sought or founded in the realm of discourse. But nobody can really live in such a place, and one thing I may have learned from this perception is that it is the very accidental character of real cities that makes them fit for human habitation, just as it is uncertainty that makes human life bearable and sometimes joyous; though I don’t carry the argument so far as Marilynn Robinson does, arguing from Johathan Edwards that the apparent arbitrariness of the world bespeaks a creator.

“My life has also been fortunate in that I’ve never been denied culture, never lacked means or opportunity to refashion myself when I needed to do so. It’s sometimes comforting to think that given the world as it seems I’d live the same life, ask for the same jobs, over again—though I know I wouldn’t. I’ve refashioned myself sufficiently and often enough to be aware that self-creation is surrounded by a thick matrix of contingency. A friend used to like to paraphrase Heraclitus: ‘You can’t step in the same river once.’ One isn’t guaranteed the world as it seems, not tomorrow, maybe not even yesterday.

“So that one founds oneself in the realm of discourse as the world rushes by—and one is fortunate if the real city one lives in affords hidey holes, places to escape, and lots of unsupervised spaces for play. The real and contingent city is as febrile as a summer street dance, as brief on the wind as a smile and a shoeshine, thick with possibility and empty of information about itself as a week-old newspaper. One dwells in it upon sufferance—I’ll go that far with Robinson, since I know neither my beginning nor my end.”

That was before a diagnosis of diastolic dysfunction and three strokes, before the sociopathic presidency of Donald Trump had begun its destructive progress through the land, before the coronavirus pandemic, with its death tolls now in the tens of thousands and its catastrophic economic destruction.

The president’s depraved indifference to our present humanitarian crisis is reinforced by his Republican supporters in congress and in the electorate. A distressing sign of these times is that the more the deaths pile up the more Trump supporters proclaim their right to demand those deaths. The social pathology that expressed itself in cries of “Lock her up!” at the Trump rallies in 2016 has now morphed into a grisly determination on the part of the Trump alliance to destroy the country, and the rest of us with it, rather than give up power. Witness the near destruction of the United States Postal Service.

Marilynn Robinson, in a recent essay in The New York Review of Books wrote that given our present chaos, and “allowing for regional variations, to the degree that democratic habits persist, the country will get by”—not a hopeful prospect. I don’t want to give up on my life or my country. Perhaps the day will come again for coffee at Mokabes or a beer at The Shaved Duck, but for today Covid-19 is in the air, and the lesson this perfect storm has for me is that, white privilege or no, I face for the first time in my life a prospect that may require me to risk my life in order to vote.

A hell of a vision

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I grew up with guns. I can remember the longing with which I wished for my Daisy Red Ryder Carbine and my first .22 rifle, a Remington single-shot I was given when I was twelve or thirteen. The only guns I own now are a couple of black powder pistols. One is a replica of the 1851 Navy Colt. I have fired it six times. After cleaning it—black powder is really filthy stuff—I decided to forego shooting it ever again.

My other pistol is an authentic 1851 Navy Colt that likely saw service in the Civil War. It is damaged in a way that was common to those pistols. The ramrod and ramrod lever are missing and the ramrod mount is broken in a way that indicates that a load discharged and blew the barrel assembly off the pistol’s body. But the old Colt has a replacement barrel wedge that looks to have been made by a blacksmith and that might have rendered the pistol capable of being used—though the cylinder (and any supplementary cylinders) would have needed to be loaded and armed separately.

My 1851 Navy is one of two Colts my grandfather first showed me when I was a child. My brother has the other, a model 1860 Army Colt that is also missing the ramrod lever, though not the ramrod, itself. This one we think came back from the Civil War with my great, great grandfather. Granddaddy didn’t know much about it. About my model 1851 he always said that one of his brothers had found it under the house when they were boys. How Granddaddy came by it I don’t know. There’s a picture of the house in question here. It sits a long way back from the main road in a now obscure township called Scottsville some 12 miles east of Marshall, Texas. My mother’s family settled there in the 1830s. I’ve written about them here and here.

Granddaddy called these pistols horse pistols. They weren’t. The Walker Colts, designed like the Patersons for the Texas Rangers, were true horse pistols, meant to be carried in holsters mounted on a rider’s saddle. They were much larger and heavier than my family pistols, which, like the Patersons, are belt pistols. The comparatively lightweight five-shot Paterson Colts gave the early Rangers the means to fight the Comanches on almost equal footing. The Walkers were a not very practical replacement. They increased the Rangers’ fire power theoretically, but they were also heavy and unwieldy. The model 1851 and 1860 Colts (and their Confederate knockoffs) were the standard sidearms of both armies during the Civil War. I’ve always been rather proud to have these old weapons in my family.

I say these thing to point out 1) that I am not an effete liberal snob who has no connection with or knowledge of guns and 2) that my Texan credentials go back a long way. I am disturbed by a recent Mother Jones Story about the killing contests that are becoming popular in Texas and other states that presently celebrate guns. Here’s a view of the conclusion of one such contest as described by a witness who happened on it outside a West Texas sporting goods store.

The lot was packed with trucks full of dead coyotes, foxes and the occasional bobcat; one pickup had a cage welded to its bed, and it was crammed with carcasses. . . . Around back, participants in the West Texas Big Bobcat Contest were weighing their kill in a competition to see who had shot the biggest bobcat and the most coyotes, gray foxes and bobcats in a 23-hour period. Some $76,000 in prize money was at stake—more than $31,000 went to the team that bagged a 32 pound bobcat. Other jackpot winners were a four-man team that killed 63 foxes, a team that killed 8 bobcats, and another that killed 32 coyotes.

Note the apparent emphasis upon numbers killed, but that’s not all that’s disturbing about this report. I am particularly disturbed by quoted comments from Jeremy Harrison, billed as a fifth-generation rancher. “To those who are offended [by the hunting contests], he has simple advice: Butt out.”

“It’s none of their business. It has nothing to do with them,” . . . “It’s one of the best things about this beautiful state of Texas. We have 100 percent support from Texas and from the local people. If they don’t like it, they can just stay away from it.”

I dissent as a Texan from this view of the large scale slaughter of wild animals. I don’t hunt for sport, but I don’t want to ban the practice. Nor do I want to ban gun ownership. But it is one thing to use guns and quite another to make a fetish of guns and killing. It is one thing to hunt for sport and another to kill indiscriminately. The killing contests are not hunting, any more than the slaughter of wolves from helicopters and airplanes in the northwest is hunting. These unsportsmanlike practices ought to be an embarrassment to hunters, on a par with game ranches where deer, elk, and other captive animals are shot like fish in a barrel by urban cowboys out for a thrill.

I have no “agenda” about this apart from ordinary human values. I regret that some anti-hunting enthusiasts have sent hate mail to Mr. Harrison’s friend, Geoff Nemnich, but since Mr. Nemnich apparently sells videos glorifying hunting contests at Cabela’s stores he can hardly sustain the claim to innocence he makes when he asks rhetorically, “And I’m the barbarian?” Nemnich makes an additional claim at the end of the Mother Jones article. The hunting “[c]ontests are completely legal . . . Some may consider it ethically wrong, but hunting has been around forever, it’s who we are out in this part of the country.”

Nenmich doesn’t speak for me either, and I think my Texan credentials are likely as good as his. My great, great grandfather sat in the legislature of the Texas Republic. And while I’m at it maybe I should say that the folks who claim to represent a secessionist Texas republic today don’t speak for me. That same great, great grandfather voted for secession in 1861, went to the bloody war that his side lost, and sat again in the Texas legislature from 1879 until 1882, after the Ku Klux Klan undid reconstruction. Surely no sane person would wish to repeat that terrible history of bloody error.

Nor does Nemnich’s idea of “who we are in this part of the country” include me, and not just because I no longer live in Texas. I watched Texas and North Carolina, the places closest to my heart in my country, change during the 1970s and 1980s as they were impacted by in-migration from the rust belt of people who brought right-wing prejudices with them and supported the ascendancy of politicians like Jesse Helms and Phil Gramm. It’s tempting to characterize today’s killing contests as the favorite blood sport of a bunch of Johnny-come-latelies.

But those Johnny-come-latelies had a home prepared for them in southern-strategy red states long before 1964. The John Birch Society and the Klan were already there. I’ve written about this too. But now I am remembering how I watched the fences along roads between Abilene and Albuquerque during childhood journeys back and forth and sometimes tried to count the skins of coyotes and wolves strung up on the barbed wire. The ruination of the prairie and its animals, the awful rabbit drives of the dust bowl era and afterwards were not blood sport. They were a different kind of killing, a denouement to the long and terrible slaughter and removal of the aboriginal inhabitants of the North American continent.

All this is well known. Much of the removal, especially that east of the Mississippi, was accomplished by European introduced disease, pandemics that spread through Native American nations and the animals upon which they depended for survival from the east coast west. But much of the removal was accomplished by wholesale slaughter and enforced starvation visited upon humans and animals alike by the human predators we have lionized as pioneers, and by official policy enforced by the United States Army. I wouldn’t bring up this past, except that Harrison and Nemnich have framed today’s killing contests as political statements. Their claim of solidarity with Texas culture and the land suggests an identification with earlier generations of Texans that they seem to think manifests itself in these present day rituals of killing for it’s own sake.

I’d rather be identified with Sam Houston than with my great, great grandfather. As governor of Texas, Houston opposed secession and was driven out of office for his pains. I’d rather be associated with the ambivalence of Charles Goodnight after the closing of the frontier. Goodnight is perhaps the most renowned of the Legendary Texas cattlemen, though he was far from being a saint, as J. Frank Dobie portrays him. Goodnight’s career spanned the early history of the Texas Rangers, the Confederacy in whose army he served, and the short post-bellum history of trail herding. He was the first to raise buffalo as livestock on a ranch close to Quitaque in the southern Panhandle after the decimation of the great herds. He died in Arizona in 1929, having survived the Indian and Lincoln County wars, famine, drought, and financial ruin, far from Quitaque, farther still from the Palo Pinto County of his salad days.

Goodnight was not unfamiliar with killing, but when he died he had a reputation as a man of peace; so much so that Laura Vernon Hamner, Goodnight’s first biographer, entitled her fictionalized life The No-Gun Man of Texas. Larry McMurtry’s characters, Augustus McRae and Woodrow Call are based in part on Goodnight and his friend Oliver Loving. Call’s exclamation to a reporter towards the end of Lonesome Dove is a quotation from Goodnight as recalled by Dobie, who interviewed Goodnight not long before he died, reported that Goodnight claimed his life had mostly been a failure, and noted that someone had once asked the old cowman to comment on his reputation as a man of vision.

“Hell of a vision!” was Goodnight’s answer.

I stand with Texas women

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I’m posting this now in advance of the vote in Austin which will almost certainly impose new and repressive restrictions on women seeking abortions and upon men and women alike seeking medical services relating to reproductive health, constituting a massive and probably unconstitutional violation of the relationship between patients and doctors. Later, I’ll have a good deal more to say, especially about so called conservative states’ denial of basic medical services to children. But today I’d just like to say unequivocally that I stand with my friends in Austin and Raleigh and Madison and Indianapolis and Columbus and in all the surrounding locales in this country where reactionary legislatures are attempting to strip citizens of long established rights.

Gone to Texas

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In a few days my beloved and I will travel to Texas together to be on hand for the 57th reunion of my high-school graduating class. I look forward to the journey partly as an escape from troubling strife at Saint Louis University, where the sway of a too powerful administration is being forcefully challenged on campus. I look forward to the journey into a past I share with old friends as well. Here is an essay about aspects of that past that come to mind at the beginning of most school years.

The first of it is mostly the concluding section of an essay entitled “The Ultimate West” that was published in Pembroke Magazine in 1993. My grandfather was from an old-time east Texas family. There’s a little township, now a suburb of Marshall, named Scottsville, for his people. My father went to the Philippines in August 1941, as a medical officer with what was called the Two Hundredth Coast Artillery from New Mexico, and never returned. My Texas home town, though I was born in Albuquerque and have always wanted to return there, is Abilene, Texas, almost in the geographic center of the state, but part of the region known as West Texas. The essay contains a section on ruined wild dogs who, according to John Graves,1 have moved into the niche in the food chain left by wolves who were systematically slaughtered in an earlier time.

‘What do I know?’ asks the skeptic, Montaigne, a question hardly heard today outside ideological disputes. As another school year opens, the seventieth for me since my early chlidhood, I ask myself again what I may have learned in all those years that is worth passing on. What I know best is a certain restlessness, which I believe to be fairly common in my generation, though less common than heart disease and ulcers. Perhaps I am spared these latter maladies by being muddle-headed and unsure of myself. Perhaps I lack character, but I can’t help feeling that my confusion is in some part the confusion of my age. Forty-odd years ago I missed seeing a planetary conjunction which was billed in the media as the truth about the Star of Bethlehem. But I and my family watched humans walk on the moon that year, on our black and white TV set in Durham, North Carolina.

In Texas, the easy certainties have always come from family, land, and religion. Habits arising from those easy certainties have broadened into the larger society amongst our timely and untimely adventures—there’s not much difference between old-time pious land grabbing and what we now call American exceptionalism—so that non-Texans take the Bushes and Rick Perry to be typical of the breed. But the frontier is gone, and though what remains of Texas chic still colors the old frontier myths with purple nostalgia, western imagery is a dead metaphor, dead as western movies. Today’s cowboys get shot out of the skies over Pakistan, or own sports franchises, or wage idiosyncratic campaigns for national office. Cowboying and land-grabbing have by and large failed us Americans as a nation, but the drama of the old-time land grabbers is still being played out in our political life as a kind of rear guard resistance to the present.

To be a West Texan is to have credit for a college course which might be called GREAT FRONTIER I as one’s birthright – the history of the Indian wars, the Alamo, the Spanish conquest and colonization of Cibola. This is particularly true for me, since I am half a New Mexican. But GREAT FRONTIER II, the history of the self-willed gallantry of Dixie, with its yankee and Elizabethan roots, is a story I can tell from family memory. Texas voted for secession 46,129 to 14,697 over Sam Houston’s opposition. Great great Granddaddy “Colonel” W. T. (Buck) Scott, with 104 slaves at the time, was in the vanguard of secessionists.2

On the other hand, Robert E. Lee was Commandant of ill-fated Camp Cooper, not far from Abilene, in the 1850’s, and I never knew it until I read it in A. C. Greene’s A Personal Country. We weren’t fighting the war of northern aggression in my family. Granddaddy was a Roosevelt Democrat and a union man. He loved to tell stories about his family and the old times, but he had put the south behind him in some crucial way, I think, when he came west in 1926.

My old friend, the late A. C. Greene, once wrote that every man has a village in his heart.3 He and I happen to share the same village, Abilene, Texas; though my Abilene is different from A. C.’s, haunted by different ghosts, and neither exists any longer. This memoir of mine recalls a past with which my own life and blood are continuous—in that village to be sure, but also in the wider story of an engrafted past I did not experience myself. I know that story first and chiefly not from books, but in the rise and fall of my grandfather’s voice.

As I sift my village memories, I know them to begin my sense of belonging, at least partly, to the culture of civilized things. One of the loveliest memories of all comes from a Christmas party given by Miss Nancy Craig Lasley, Abilene’s piano teacher. To be sure there were others who taught the keyboard in my village, but Miss Lasley was the chief, just as the Clack sisters and Selma Bishop were schoolmarms to the generations at Abilene High. This particular party was one of the last times Miss Lasley lit candles on her Christmas tree, around 1953. After music and punch and cookies, we students and guests and firemen—there had to be a fire truck handy—were allowed to take the candles from the tree and keep them. I still have mine, somewhere, with its little German silver holder. That’s my village, Mozart sonatas at Christmas in an old house on Grape Street, when Grape Street still had brick paving. I should like my memoir to end there, but it doesn’t.

In the continuing city that surrounds my village, there remains a great fund of uncivilized energy, and more, something far more fearful. I think my ancestors slaughtered the southwestern wolves because of the ruined dog in themselves. Great great Grandaddy W. T. shot Robert Potter, I was always told.4 As the originator of the crime of Potterism and an original of the expression ‘Gone to Texas,’ Potter may have needed killing, but where does the good fight end and something else take over? Potter himself might have asked the question.5 At some point even righteous anger becomes gratuitous. ‘What’s the matter with you Texans?’ I remember being asked after Charles Whitman shot sixteen people from the library tower at the University in Austin. ‘What’s the matter with you Greeks?’ cry Aeschylus and the tragedians. We reply that blind Homer long ago invoked the rage of doomed Achilles as the ground of poetry.

These days I sometimes find myself humming the old prophetic hymns I remember from Sunday evenings, when we let our hair down and recalled the claims of the historic church militant. “Doubt and fear and things of earth/in vain to me are calling./ None of these shall move me . . . !” Ten thousand years in the promised land, the greed, the visionary idealism, the tenacity, the dogmatism, the bravado that tells you to suck it up when somebody dies: “Methinks I see a strong and puissant nation,” but let that go. The old west may be the shine on God’s backside—or only a media event.

When I was a student at SMU, a friend’s father died back in Abilene. My friend called to tell me about it and when the funeral was, and to ask me to come and help him with his mother, who was pretty bad off. He asked me too, to bring him his car, which he had left with me the week before. I drove my friend’s car the 180 miles from Dallas to Abilene in under three hours, flat out ninety miles an hour most of the way. A semi almost ran me down near Ranger, driving on the wrong side of the road. I swerved into the ditch and kept on trucking, as the saying goes.

I don’t remember very much about the funeral, or consoling my friend’s mother, but I remember the ride in that 300 horsepower 1953 Olds Rocket 88 with a fourspeed hydramatic and power steering – my God, I remember that ride!

Notes

1See Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land, New York: 1982.
2See William Thomas Scott, The Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical Association, 1999; And Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865, Louisiana State University Press, 1991.
3In A Personal Country, New York, 1969.
4Who actually shot potter is problematic, but it likely wasn’t W. T. Scott. With respect to my grandfather’s stories I think he told us what he had heard, but that he had heard about his grandfather at least one story that might have been told of his maternal great-grandfather. W. T. and many of his kin came to Texas in the entourage of Wm. Pinckney Rose, ‘Old Rose,’ the ‘Lion of the Lakes,’ at a time when the country south of Caddo Lake was still part of a no man’s land along the Sabine River. W. T. had married one of Old Rose’s daughters and named one of his sons Preston Rose Scott, after Old Rose’s famous son. Old Rose may or may not have been the leader of a band of Regulators, and Robert Potter may or may not have been a Moderator, Regulators and Moderators being rival vigilante groups. But Old Rose and Potter seem to have fallen out over a piece of land, though the story of their enmity has all the earmarks of a family feud, the two having been born within sixteen miles of each other. Old Rose had been born in Oxford, North Carolina, in 1787, Potter, down the road in Brassfield township in 1799. It was in Granville County, around Oxford, where Potter’s exploits became legendary in 1831, though by that time, of course, Old Rose was in Mississippi. In her memoir, Harriet Ames Potter names John Washington Scott, one of W. T.’s brothers, as the actual killer of her lover, says Scott did the shooting while Rose held a gun on her. Apparently, J. W. Scott, like W. T., had also married one of Old Rose’s daughters. The official indictment, to which Ms. Ames swore (ultimately dismissed on grounds of “informality”), names Old Rose, Preston Rose, J. W. Scott, and some nine others. Potter was shot on March 2, 1842. Harriet Ames’s memoir, “The History of Harriet A. Ames during the early days of Texas, [written by herself in New Orleans at the age of 83]” has never been published. Elith Hamilton Kirkland notes that the memoir was “discovered” in 1936 “among Harriet’s relatives,” and that copies of it have circulated privately ever since. A copy is housed in the Library Archives of the University of Texas at Austin. I have relied on extracts quoted by Ernest G. Fischer for details from the memoir, as well as for some details of Potter’s life. See Love Is a Wild Assault, Fredericksburg, TX, 1959, and Fischer’s Robert Potter: Founder of the Texas Navy, Gretna, LA, 1976.
5About Potter, see this and this. On August 28, 1831 Potter, then a member of the United States House of Representatives from Oxford, North Carolina, attacked his wife’s cousin and another man he suspected of improper relations with his wife and castrated them both. He served six months in jail and paid a fine of $2000 for his crime. His wife eventually divorced him. He was reelected to a term in the North Carolina House of Commons, where had served before serving int he U. S. Congress, but was ultimately expelled from that body. In 1835, Potter migrated to Texas, where he continued his flamboyant life. My Old friend, the late sam Ragan who grew up in Oxford, NC, told me once that Potter had been convicted of misdemeanor assault because North Carolina at the time had no specific law under which to try him. After the fact the state passed such a law, and the crime of Potterism became illegal in North Carolina.