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 our understanding of anything has to start with our
own background. What else do we know? I claimed to teach
literature,
claimed to be able to read documents from a remote culture. How
could I do that? Well, I thought I recognized my own human
feelings in those far away writings. I was careful to learn as
much as I could about them, and careful not to impute my own notions
into them. Or so I imagined. I soon had to recognize that
the German Classics speak quite differently on the Rhine or the Vistula
from the way they speak to a boy on the Brazos or the Red.
Highway 67 runs southwest out of Saint Louis,
that great city, twelve hundred miles to pass through Cormac McCarthy
country all the way to the Rio Grande. But for me,
67 pretty much terminates in the Texas town
where I was born. I have been through Bradey, Brownwood, Comanche
and De Leon and
Dublin. Up in Weatherford is the grave of Oliver Loving, who
helped Charlie Goodnight trail the stray cattle to market, through
Indian territory. It was their success drew my
grandfather's father out beyond the Brazos.
As for my mother, she had as a
young woman left rural Arkansas for a college education, and had found
work for a doctor in Dallas. Driving further east on 67 will take
you
under the motto, spelled in incandescent light
bulbs across the main street of Greenville, "The
Blackest Land and the Whitest People," buttoday primmed to "The
Blackest
Land
and the Best People." Then comes Sulphur
Springs (some of her people are buried there), followed by the sameness
of
Mount Vernon, Mount Pleasant, Omaha, Naples, Basset, Maud,
and finally
across the Red River into Arkansas where her
grandparents
had
settled. Just
to the north lay Old Washington, where her parents got married.
That was the
jumping-off place for migrants to
Texas. To the south lies Garland City, surrounded by cotton fields and wholly
occupied still
today by children of slaves. My youth was spent traveling that
stretch of 67, and 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 can still remember
well. But we had to leave 67 for Illinois, where I was to
continue my studies in 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 were drawing their meaning not just from the Ancients, as
my teachers told me, but also from that highway.
The scrub oak and graze back down
beyond Dallas we called "West Texas," I guess because in the days of
Goodnight
and Loving it was just about as far west as you would care to go.
To an adult eye today it 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 at a grass fire with tow sacks drenched in the lake
water (grass fires could get out of hand, in Texas).
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 clear
as ever. They are still quite illegible, but I
know they spell my name. That summer of
1934 is memorable for the ominous black dust cloud out of
Oklahoma, 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.
A sign over
the gate announced that the GORMAN COUNTRY CLUB began at the wind-blown putting
greens of oiled-down sawdust and sand. My grandfather, who
died the year I was born, had supplied this acreage. My family
had moved into a little cottage on the lake he had dammed up.
This is where consciousness emerged for
me. Later, we moved into his
little rent
house
near Gorman. I suspect those were times
when my father was
out of a job. By my next birthday, we were in Abilene.
In our garage sat a man with his hat pulled down over his face and
wearing an old suit, pockets stuffed with toys,
candies and more of the bright orange 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
little Barbara, and also of Sonny Goodloe, are inversed from memories
at the
cottage. Here in Abilene, 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 it is probably 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,
but 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--but I get ahead of myself.
Our family moved frequently. My father
tried
to find and to hold onto a job. So long as there were goods to
repossess, he
worked for a finance company. He could also fill a post as book
keeper in those long years before automation by
computer. In the late 1930s he served as a jobber, the 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. My father 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
Tractor dealerships. I touch on all this in "Tidewater to
Dustbowl." Here, I just want to explain why the highways were
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 own 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 Mary Roberts Rinehart, Ring Lardner, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Norman Reilly Raine (Tugboat Annie), William Hazlitt Upson
(Alexander Botts), C. S Forester (Captain Hornblower), etc. I
knew my mother and
father liked The Post--she
read it to him in bed at night. 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. My
mother explained 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.
It was Florence who got me my first job
through her employer, the Gulf Oil Company. I got paid union
wages (triple that of the less fortunate contract labor) working as
roustabout on the pipelines near Spindletop, the first big oil producer
in South Texas.