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.