Prudence Mackintosh

My ears are attuned to the voices of East Texas even though I've lived in the city for twenty years. "I oughta' whup the tar outta you," I hear a mother tell her son as I finger the Jacksonville tomatoes at the Farmer's Market. I linger around the okra, hungrier for the expressions of my childhood than for the produce.

I was born two blocks inside the Texas state line in Texarkana. Like all Texas school children, I spent a seventh grade school year studying Texas history and geography. I can sing "Texas Our Texas," and I once performed a modern dance routine to "Deep in the Heart of Texas." Sitting on the public library steps waiting for my mother to pick me up, I gradually memorized one side of the inscription on Jim Bowie's statue. "Dreams of fabulous wealth lured Bowie to the San Saba region where he met with unexpected Indian attack...." I was even a delegate to Bluebonnet Girls' State in l96l. My first writing effort appeared in the Texas Junior Historian magazine. Despite all those credentials, when I left the shadowy Piney woods for the liquid blue skies and glaring limestone of Austin , I gradually realized that much of what I had grown up believing was Texan was Southern. The cherished myths of Texas had little to do with my part of the state. I knew dogwood, china berry, crape myrtle and mimosa, but no bluebonnets or Indian paintbrush. Although the Four States Fair and Rodeo was held in my town, I never really learned to ride a horse. I never knew anyone who wore cowboy hats or boots as anything other than a costume. I knew farmers whose fences were bois d'arc and “bob wire” and whose property was known as Old Man So-and so’s place, not ranchers with their cattlebrands arched over entrance gates. I knew ponds, not tanks. Streets in my town were called Wood, Pine, Olive and Boulevard, not Guadalupe and LaVaca. Mexico was so remote that we called it Old Mexico. I knew people and a lot of things in only two colors--black and white. I quickly discovered that women who had grown up with less shade and more sky seemed less constrained than I was by the Southern dictum "What will people think?"

It did not occur to me until I read William Humphrey's l964 novel, THE ORDWAYS, that my forbears in East Texas were the less adventurous of the Texas pioneers. Humphrey describes them this way. "Mountain men, woodsmen, swampers, hill farmers, they came out into the light, stood blinking at the flat and featureless immensity spread before them, where there were no logs to build cabins or churches, no rails for fences, none of the game whose ways they knew, and cowered back into the familiar shade of the forest, from there to farm the margins of the prairie like a timid bather testing the water with his toe.”

Cowering back into the familiar shade? Timid bathers? Could I still boast of being a fifth-generation Texan if my great- great-grandfather Samuel Corley eschewed the vast and lonely Texas prairies to ride a Presbyterian circuit running just inside the state's eastern border from St. Augustine to the Red River? Growing up so close to the state line in Texarkana, I've always feared that minor legislative gerrymandering might declare me an Arkansan. On the other hand, if the Corley family had charged on westward, their horses might have given out in Fort Stockton. I might have learned to sit a horse, but I would have missed the trees, the sandy bottomed swimming holes, the hiding places and the mystery indigenous to East Texas.

Historians have suggested that the trees in East Texas blocked our vision and walled us off from the outside world. From a child's perspective, trees were simply an integral part of our games. How could a kid in Fort Stockton play a serious game of Tarzan or Swiss Family Robinson or even Hide and Seek without thick trunks, vines and pine needle carpeting? My mudpies were baked with mulberries or wild cherries. Chinaberries were ammunition. The partially exposed roots of an old oak tree could provide shelter for dolls or trolls or small plastic Indians . Magnolia trees offered totally enclosed play spaces, sturdy climbing limbs for even the smallest children, and cones with magic red lacquered seeds.
Family and extended family provided additional shelter. Fourth and fifth cousins once or twice removed were counted as family. Family pride and the possibility of family shame were potent forces in East Texas. My father remembers being cautioned each time he left home, "Remember whose son you are." Who you were counted for more than what you had, and according to my grandmother, what you never wanted to be, was "common." Texarkana was too big to harbor much of the clannishness or xenophobia that existed in smaller East Texas towns. A newcomer to these towns, even a much needed doctor might initially be welcomed with a flurry of Southern hospitality, but eventually the stranger would feel a chill while the locals withdrew to speculate on who his people were.

Families in East Texas were once bound not only by blood, but by certain traditions. My relatives could sing in four part harmony, some could play musical instruments and almost all could tell stories. Recently, I had lunch with a handsome male cousin of mine who purports to be "ninety two damn years old" and right there in Wyatt's Cafeteria, I got him to recite "The Ladies" from Kipling's Ballads and Barrack Room Ballads . Every time our family gathers, certain heartily embellished stories are told or at least alluded to. The story of “The Rattling Fork,” "The Dog on the Tilt-Top Table," "The Day Mama Ran Away, " "Uncle Burton and the Gideon Bibles" or the adventures of Troubador, a well-known dog-about-town who urinated on the preacher's leg during Chigger Corley's funeral, cannot be written down. They are theatrical performances that require raucous audience participation and may require the tale- teller to assume the countenance of a dog. My family's penchant for irreverent theatrical behavior was thought to be inherited and therefore unavoidable. Every time one of my brother's tales caused my Aunt Lois 's legendary torrential cackle to erupt, he was rewarded by the familys' acknowledging "Why, young J.Q.'s got a lot of his Uncle Burton in him," Certain strains in families are tenacious. Uncle Burton, who has been dead thirty five years, was surely smiling somewhere the night my own small son who could hardly lisp his own name returned from the Ranger Game imitating the bleacher vendors " Co beah? Co beah?" I haven't decided yet which of my three will have to memorize Kipling's "Ladies."

Trees sheltered us and we were embraced by our families, but our churches taught us that all was lost, if we weren't also "leaning on the Everlasting Arms." Although my roots were Presbyterian, and most of the family remained there, my particular branch strayed first to Methodism and finally to the First Baptist Church , the biggest church in town…