I spent my life as a teacher, but I might have
trouble naming my own. I guess I would look for them along US
Highway 67, or in the annals of German Idealism. Those were my
schools. A teacher does profess to know something about what he
is teaching, but of course any understanding has to start with one's
own background. What else do we know?
I claimed to teach literature,
claimed to be able to read documents from a remote culture. But across a great remove of time
and place the only understanding possible is in
whatever human qualities can be found on either side. I even
go along with those who argue that humanity itself is achieved only out
of the manifold different understandings of itself.
Highway 67 runs southwest out of Saint Louis,
that great city, twelve hundred miles to pass through Cormac McCarthy
country and end on the Rio Grande. But for me,
67's other terminus is Brownwood, Texas,
where I was born. I have been through Comanche and De Leon and
Dublin, up to Weatherford, where Oliver Loving lies buried. His
success in rounding up stray cattle and trailing them to market is what
drew my grandfather's father out beyond the Brazos. I have lived
in Dallas, where several of my mother's siblings established
themselves. 67 will take you on back east beyond Greenville (its prominently displayed
motto, "The
Blackest Land and the Whitest People," primmed to "The Blackest Land
and the Best People"), Sulphur
Springs (I courted a
wife at a college not far from there), then through the sameness of
Mount Vernon, Mount Pleasant,Omaha, Naples, Basset, Maud, and
Texarkana, finally
into Miller County, where my mother's people had settled. Just
north is Old Washington, the jumping-off place for migrants to
Texas. On the Red River to the south lies Garland City, wholly
occupied still
today by children of slaves. My life was spent traveling that
stretch of 67, or its replacements by President Eisenhower's Interstate.
When I got married the little couple drove
on up through Prescott and Little Rock, Newport, Walnut Ridge,
Pocahontas, Poplar Bluff, and lots of other towns I cannot
remember. We had to leave 67 for Illinois, so that I could
continue in the school of German history and culture. For a half
century I thought of myself as a German teacher. There came a
time then at last when I understood that German language, literature,
and history drew their meaning not just from the Ancients, but
from US Highway 67.
To an adult eye today West Texas might seem
desolate, oppressively hot. I got a pair of little red India
rubber bathing shoes, we lived at a cottage on the lake. I could
wade on the murky bottom. I was not permitted to swim, but my
father would let me ride his soft, freckled shoulders when he
dog-paddled in the shallows. My mother fussed when he took me out
in the rowboat to run the trot line. She loved picnics, and Texas
was volatile in the summertime. I remember her bending forward,
violently beating that grass fire with tow sacks drenched in the lake
(she set many more fires at other times and other places, too).
For my third birthday, my older cousins Bob and Weldon Kirk gave me a
watermelon with white scratches on its green rind. That little
melon still stands before my three-year-old gaze, the scratches still
clear, though illegible. I
know they spell my name. I took that to be of some
importance. I turned three in the summer of
1934, after April's ominous black dust cloud, symbol of the Great
Depression which enveloped and smothered so many. I knew that I had been born
into the happiest
time and the best of all places.
Thus emerges consciousness at the little
cottage at the Gorman Country Club with its wind-blown putting
greens of oiled-down sawdust. My grandfather either
still owned the lake or arranged
for us to live there. Later, we moved into his little rent house
near Gorman. I suspect it was at a time when my father was
out of a job. I also remember my next birthday, in Abilene, how
in the garage sat a man with his hat pulled down over his face and
wearing an old suit of my father's, his pockets stuffed with toys and
candies and more of the bright confetti that had guided my little
troupe out the front door and around the house with the help of Barbara
Bently's older sister (who was in charge). My memories of
Barbara, and also of Sonny Goodloe, are different from memories at the
cottage. I am participant no longer, but have become a
mere
observer. I see the red hand print on Barbara Bently's tear
stained cheek, and I think some little boy must have put it
there. I see my pickaninny rag doll high in the air, arms and
legs
outstretched above what must be a garbage truck, and I think Sonny
Goodloe threw her, but maybe I did. I see my mother's shocked
face looking down as I stand on the back door step, with my bucket of
horned toads. I cannot really see what she sees, but I know there
must be blood spattered on my white, crisp shirt front. An
enlightened woman (a schoolteacher), my mother always scoffed at the
idea that horned toads spit blood, although everyone else in Abilene
knew they did.
At Abilene is where my little sister appeared,
although she does not yet arise in my memory. Later
generations have lamented the way little girls were coddled, sheltered,
abused throughout history, including my day. My sister was a
tall, slender, talented and beautiful girl. I was admonished to
take care of her. She had many friends and beaux, at last married
a very tall, dark and handsome Air Force officer. They lived the
American Dream until his flights over Viet Nam, or perhaps other things
as well, became too much for him--but I get ahead of myself.
Our family moved frequently as my father tried
to keep a job. So long as there were goods to repossess, he
worked for a finance company. I believe my father may also have
worked as book keeper in those long years before automation by
computer. In the late 1930s he served as middleman between
tractor dealers and the tractor distributor. I remember the
Oliver Tractor store in San Benito, Texas, and I believe also the John
Deere people. He was enthusiastic about the new hydraulic
Ferguson
system used on Ford tractors, well adapted to the lighter soils in
Texas. Eventually he had good and bad fortune as owner of Ford
dealerships. I touch on all this in "Tidewater to
Dustbowl." Here, I just want to explain why the highway was
so
important to me and my sister, fussing and playing in the back
seat. I was never at one school for longer than a semester.
Our family's many moves, together with perhaps my innate shyness, cut
me off from usual childhood associations. I was the new boy in
San Benito (two times), Waxahachie, Gainesville, Gorman, Dallas (also
twice), Fouke, Houston,
Texarkana. Teachers did not know me. Sometimes children
play tricks on an outsider, but I cannot say I suffered
especially. I did get accustomed to solitude, unaccustomed
to association with children my age.
On the other hand, I was frequently in the
company of my mother's siblings. These were literate people
formed by Robert Burns and Walter Scott, by Emerson and Longfellow, but
also, whether they knew it or not, by Herbert Spencer's social
Darwinism. My mother most looked up to my Uncle Harry, a CPA and
partner in Haskins and Sells, at that time one of the major accounting
firms. From him I heard at an early age how "The stag at eve had
drunk his fill / When danced the moon on Monan's Rill . . .," but I
also
got advice like "Root hog or die," pronounced with enthusiasm and
gusto. These were children of the Gilded Age, sophisticated
enough to know that Twain had meant the term derisively, but also with
faith in Teddy Roosevelt's Square Deal, and Horatio Alger's honest hard
work. The oldest male was Albert, who had stayed home in Arkansas
where he had a mail route and subscribed to Grit, a weekly which
enflamed his near pathological rage at the Franklin Roosevelt New
Deal. Albert may have been the one with whom I was most closely
associated, simply because he found in me a sounding board. The
two who were most solicitous of me were the oldest sister, Pearl, a R.
N. who believed in harsh practicality, and the spinster, Florence.
My father never forgot how Pearl once offered
to pay him fifty cents to wash her car (she had to pay someone, she
said). When I was six and we were living for a time in Dallas,
she insisted I hawk The Saturday Evening Post at a local
shopping
corner. The Post was a
literate magazine in those days when the
American short story was flourishing, and it offered some of the most
respected authors. I knew my mother and father liked to read it,
and I have no memory of being embarrassed in my efforts to sell it--but
then I can remember no particular success at it, either. Four
years later, in Houston, I sold the magazine door to door. It
cost a nickel a copy, and
I think I may actually have got two cents of that. I remember my
mother explaining to me that The
Saturday Evening Post relied not upon
sales for its profits, but upon ads. This of course was the early
heyday of advertising. My Uncle Harry demanded my commentary upon
the wisdom of Coca Cola (the most notorious advertiser), as compared
with Hershey's (which eschewed the practice). He liked to pose
such questions to me with a memorably judgmental air. He took a
profound philosophical interest in double-entry bookkeeping. I
remember his explanation of the balance sheet entry "good will," which
I confess still offers me a problem in the analysis of corporations
today. My Aunt Florence may have been the only one who took a
genuine interest in childhood--I remember her scolding me for my
inferiority complex (Freud had become popular by the time I was about
ten years old). Aunt Florence was very generous, but like the
others, properly imperious toward poor relations.