Now it was my turn, and I could not imagine what Lorenzo had deemed proper for a man with few distinguishing characteristics, but when I opened my box it was apparent that he had gone back to my honored ancestor, Moses Barlow of the Alamo, for across the top rims of my boots, in flaming red letters against a pale-blue background, ran the word Alamo, and beneath it, in green-and-white leatherwork, stood a depiction of the famous building. Reaching from the sole of the shoe to the top, along the outer flank of each boot, rested a Kentucky long rifle, in black. My boots were pure Texas, and I was glad to have them, for with my own funds I could never have afforded such perfection.
Because of the incipient animosity between Quimper and Garza, rarely overt but never buried, I had to wonder what Lorenzo would do to catch the professor’s personality, but when Efraín opened his box we gasped, because for him Quimper had saved his maximum artistry. In a wild flash of red, green and white, the colors of Mexico’s flag, he had provided a peon in a big hat sleeping beside an abode wall, a depiction of the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe and an intricate enlargement of the central design of the flag, the famous eagle killing a rattlesnake while perched on a cactus.
Referring proudly to the latter, Quimper said: ‘I had my best workman do the vulture eating the worm,’ and Garza looked up with a mixture of affection and sheer bewilderment. For more than two hundred years his family had had no permanent affiliation with Mexico; he had traveled within that nation only once, and then not pleasantly, and although he spoke its language and followed its religion, he felt no close association with the country. Yet here he was with boots that proclaimed him loudly to be a Mexican.
‘Lorenzo,’ he said with obvious gratitude, ‘I think I can speak for us all. You are magnificent.’
Our three staff members, who had watched the unveiling of our boots, cheered, but now Quimper signaled his other pilot, who came forward with three boxes. When the young people realized that these must be for them, the two young men clapped hands and the girl from SMU squealed, and the highlight of the ceremony was when she opened her box, for Lorenzo had brought her a pair equal to Miss Cobb’s in femininity, but precisely the kind a young woman would appreciate. They were tall and slender, with heels well undercut and uppers made of a soft red leather that seemed to shout: ‘I’m twenty-three and unmarried!’ The simple decoration was in shining black, and the total effect was one of youthfulness, dancing and an invitation to flirtation. Miss Cobb said: ‘Every young woman should know what it’s like to own a pair of boots like that,’ and the recipient began to cry.
The two men received simple cowboy boots made of valuable leather adorned by big hats, lariats and revolvers, and when the seven pairs were set side by side on the floor, we applauded, but Lorenzo rarely did things partially, for now the chief pilot came in with a box for the boss, and as we cheered, Quimper revealed his own fantastic boots. Basically they were a wild purple, but in their lighter leathers they contained a summary of Texan culture: a saucy roadrunner yakking across the desert, a Colts pistol, an oil well, a coiled rattlesnake. ‘I like my boots to make a statement,’ Quimper said, and Garza responded: ‘Those can be heard on the borders of California.’ And that night, when we stepped from the front door of the ranch on our way to dinner at a Santa Fe restaurant, we were what Quimper called ‘a splendiferous Task Force.’
At dinner, Quimper dominated conversation by expounding in a voice loud enough to be heard at nearby tables his theory that Santa Fe should have been a part of Texas: ‘The day will come when Texas patriots will muster an expedition to recapture this town. Then we’ll have Texas as it should be, Santa Fe at one end, Houston at the other.’
When we left the restaurant we found our evening somewhat dampened by a sign plastered across our windshield: TEXANS GO HOME, which reminded us that New Mexicans regard the Texans who flood their towns in summer the way Texans regard the visitors from Michigan who invade their state in winter.
Refreshed by this escape from the Texan inferno, we prepared for our forthcoming meeting in Beaumont, where we met Professor Garvey Jaxifer, a sophisticated black scholar. The newspapers usually referred to him as Harvey Jaxifer, unaware that he had been named after the incendiary Jamaican black Marcus Garvey, who had lectured American blacks about their destiny and their rights. That first Garvey had been deported, I believe, but had left behind a sterling reputation as a fighter, and our professor was no less an agitator than his namesake. He presented a short, no-compromise paper, whose highlights follow:
‘Throughout their history Anglo Texans have despised Indians, Mexicans and blacks. This tradition started with the Spanish conquistadores, who saw their Indians as slaves and treated them abominably. This attitude was intensified by any Mexicans who were not classified as Indians themselves. We have seen how in 1836, General Santa Anna had no compunction about marching his barefoot, thinly clad Yucatecan Indians into the face of a blizzard, losing more than half through freezing to death.
‘The early Texians inherited this contempt for the Indian, strengthened by understandable prejudices engendered in frontier states like Kentucky and Tennessee, where warfare with the Indian had been a common experience. But it was fortified in Texas by the fact that many of the Indian tribes encountered by the early settlers were extremely difficult people: the cannibalistic Karankawa, the remorseless Waco and the savage Kiowa. The earliest Americans had to fight such Indians for every foot of ground they occupied, and this blinded them to the positive aspects of the other Indians they encountered, especially the Cherokee.
‘Later, of course, the Texians met face-to-face with the fearful Apache and Comanche, and with the most generous intentions in the world it would have been difficult to find any solution to the clash which then occurred. No outsider ignorant of the bloody history of the 1850 to 1875 frontier, with its endless massacres and hideous tortures, has a right to condemn the Texas settlers for the manner in which they responded.
‘But Texas lost a great deal when it expelled its Indians, and the debt is only now being collected. For one thing, the state lost a group of people who could have contributed to our wonderful diversity had they remained; but much more important, their expulsion encouraged the Texian to believe that he truly was supreme, lord of all he surveyed, and that he could order lesser peoples around as he wished. The Indian was long gone when the real tragedy of his departure began to be felt, because the Texian diverted his wrath from the Indian to the Mexican and the black, and the scars of this transferral are with us to this day.
‘I am assured that previous scholars have spoken of the heavy burden Texas bears because of its refusal to adjust to the Mexican problem, so I shall drop that subject. I shall restrict myself solely to the way in which Texas has handled its black problem, and because my allotted time is short, I shall address you shortly, sharply, and without that body of substantiating material I would normally offer.
The condition of the black in Texas is one of the great secrets of Texas history, which has been written almost as if the blacks had never existed. Yet in 1860 blacks constituted thirty-one percent of the population and represented a total tax value of over a hundred and twenty-two million dollars. They vastly outnumbered either the Mexicans or the Indians, and the economy of the state, dominated by cotton, depended largely upon them.
‘Despite vast evidence to the contrary, two legends grew up around the blacks, one before the Civil War, one after, and these legends were so persuasive, so consoling to the Texas whites, that they are not only honored today but also believed. They continue to affect all relations between the two races.
The ante-bellum legend is that the slaves were happy in their servitude, that they did not seek freedom, and that they did not warrant it because they had no skills other than chopping cotton and could not possibly have existed without white supervision. The facts were somewhat different. On most plantations slaves were the master mechanics. They were nurses of extraordinary skill and compassion. They were also custodians of
the land, and many saved enough money to buy their own freedom. Properly encouraged and utilized, they could have earned Texas far more as mechanics than they did through cotton.
‘But the perplexing part of the legend was that while the slaves were supposed to be happy under the compassionate tutelage of their white masters, Texas newspapers were filled with rumors of slave uprisings, of slaves burning the masters’ barns and of general insurrection. Scores of county histories tell of executions of slaves to forestall rebellion, and slave flight to Mexico became so common that from time to time agents were stationed along the border to prevent it. I can speak of this with some authority, because my great-great-grandfather used that route to escape from his slavery on the plantation of your ancestors, Miss Cobb, where, I hasten to add, he told his children that he had been well treated. But once he got the chance—over the Rio Grande into Mexico.’
‘What did he do when he got there?’ Quimper asked, and Jaxifer replied: ‘Made his way to Vera Cruz, caught a ship to New Orleans, where he enlisted in a New York regiment.’
‘You mean he fought with the North?’ Quimper grumbled, and Jaxifer asked: ‘What did you expect?’ and Quimper said: ‘He could of remained neutral.’
Professor Jaxifer continued: The Texians found no difficulty in believing both halves of this ante-bellum legend: that the same slave was deliriously happy, yet thirsting to massacre his master.
‘The post-bellum legend was more destructive. The genesis was understandable. The South had been defeated. The North, especially under President Lincoln, wanted to be generous in its treatment, but his assassination opened the way for some radicals in Congress to force upon the South an intolerable Reconstruction. One of the ironies of Texas history is that its newspapers and its people rejoiced when Lincoln was shot, condemning him as one of the supreme tyrants of all time, not realizing that he alone could have enabled their state to avoid the convulsion it was about to suffer. It was 1902 before the first paper was brave enough to print one kind word about Lincoln, and it was abused for having done so.
The true history of Reconstruction in Texas has not yet been written and probably cannot be in this century; the legend of that tempestuous time is still too virulent. Regarding blacks, it makes three claims: that those blacks elected to office under Northern supervision of the ballot box were incompetent at best, downright thieves at the worst; it claims that blacks who suddenly found themselves with freedom did not know what to do with it; and most important, it claims that the occasional black members of the State Police installed by the carpetbagger government were brutal murderers. Nothing in the history of Texas has damaged the black more than the fact that a few were for a while members of the State Police, that hated and reviled agency.
‘Again, the legend is faulty at best, infamous at worst. Black legislators seem to have been no worse than their white contemporaries and successors. Many blacks learned quickly what to do with their freedom, and either established their own homes and small businesses or went back to work on the plantations as sharecroppers. And as for the black policemen, if they did, as charged, kill eight or ten white men without warrant, the Rangers had killed eight or ten hundred Mexicans and Indians, yet the former are reviled and the latter immortalized. It is a disproportion that cannot easily be explained.’
Professor Jaxifer then threw in an obiter dictum which really stunned our Texas landlovers: ‘If you suspect I’m overemphasizing the bitterness of Reconstruction, let me cite an incident which you better than most will appreciate. In 1868 a Republican-controlled convention, drawing new laws for peacetime Texas, recalled the hardships under which Texans who had fought on the Union side suffered: “These patriots were mercilessly slandered in their good names and property.” In recompense they would be issued free land, but it went unclaimed, because in all of land-hungry Texas no man was brave enough to stand before his neighbors as one who “had been false to the Confederacy and no better than a carpetbagger.” ’
‘You mean,’ Quimper asked, ‘that all this free land was waiting and no one claimed it?’ When Jaxifer nodded, Lorenzo added: ‘For a Texan to pass up free land is an act of moral heroism.’ Jaxifer smiled and continued with these points:
‘The hatreds engendered spawned a curious progeny. Many of the gunslingers of the Old West began by shooting blacks who had given no offense, and such bravado gained them the approbation of their fellows. Billy the Kid started by slaughtering a Negro blacksmith who made a pun upon his name, calling him Billy the Goat. He gained much applause for his quick and deadly response. As one hagiographer has said: “A flick of his wrist, a touch of his finger, and Billy silenced forever those thick, black, insolent lips.”
‘John Wesley Hardin, a cold-eyed, merciless killer who gunned down twenty-nine men before he was twenty-four, was despised prior to the day when he shot two black policemen; then he found himself a Texas hero. But the prototype of the Texas gunman was Cole Yeager, from Xavier County, who announced one day at the age of eighteen: “I cannot abide a freed nigger.” He proved it by shooting in the stomach a young black who had argued with an older black. When asked about this, Yeager muttered: “The Bible says ‘Ye shall respect thy elders,’ ” and no charges were lodged.
‘Some time later he saddled up at dusk in the small town of Lexington, not far from the capital, galloped through the street, and slaughtered eight unsuspecting blacks. His high spirits were excused on the ground that “this was the kind of incident that was bound to happen … sooner or later.”
‘Pleased with his reputation as a nigger-killer, he was lounging in Jefferson, up in the Cotton Belt, one Sunday morning when he saw two well-dressed blacks, Trajan Cobb and his wife, Pansy, leaving their cottage and heading for the black church. Enraged that former slaves should be “tryin’ to be better than they was,” Yeager whipped out his guns and killed them.
‘They happened to work as freedmen for Senator Cobb, the one-armed hero of the Confederacy, and when he heard in Washington of what had happened, he returned immediately to Texas, determined to bring Yeager to justice, and with his tiny wife, Petty Prue, he roamed the state, looking for the man who had killed his former slaves.
‘Federal marshals, afraid of the scandal which might ensue if Yeager gunned down a one-armed United States senator, tried to dissuade Cobb from stalking his prey, but Cobb would not listen: “When a man has affronted the honor of an entire state, he must be taken care of, and if you gentlemen are afraid to go after him, I must.”
‘The marshals tried to persuade Mrs. Cobb to call off her man, but she snapped: “Trajan Cobb bears our name. He held our plantation together during the war, and if Somerset doesn’t shoot the coward who killed him, I will.”
‘Fortunately, at about this time, Cole Yeager killed a white man, shot him in the back during an argument over fifty cents, and now the law had a viable excuse for arresting him. Under pressure from Senator Cobb, a fearless judge from Victoria County was brought north, and Yeager, who had now killed thirty-seven men, most of them black, was sentenced to be hanged.
‘The Cobbs were there when the execution took place, and they groaned as the rope broke, allowing Yeager to fall unscathed. Some in the crowd cited an old English tradition which said that under such circumstances, the condemned man had to be set free, in that God had intervened, and there were murmurs to support this, for many in the audience felt it was unfair to hang a white man primarily because he had killed niggers.
‘However, Cobb, with his good right arm, whipped out his revolver and announced: “We are not hanging him according to old English law. We’re using new Texas law. String the son-of-a-bitch up”—and it was done.
‘One of the more interesting illustrations of how difficult it was for Texans to adjust to the freed Negro came in Robertson County, not far from where we sit. A gifted black, Harriel Geiger, had been elected to the state legislature, and during his tenure in Austin had studied law and become a member of the bar. He excelled in defending black prisone
rs, but this irritated Judge O. D. Cannon of the Robertson bench, who is described in chronicles as “that hot-tempered segregationist.” In any trial involving a black the judge had been in the habit of listening to whatever evidence the white man chose to present—he did not allow any black to testify—then growling, spitting, and sentencing the black to a long term on the prison work force. Naturally, he did not take it kindly when Lawyer Geiger, with the skills he had mastered as a legislator, came into his court arguing points of law.
‘One hot afternoon Judge Cannon had suffered enough: “I been warnin’ you to watch your step, nigger, but you have insolently ignored my counsel.” With that, he whipped out a long revolver, held it three feet from the lawyer’s chest, and pulled the trigger five times. The coroner’s verdict: Harriel Geiger had been guilty of repeated contempt and had been properly rebuked.
‘I agree, there are elements of humor in this incident: the irascible judge, the presumptuous new lawyer, the challenge to old customs, the sullen revenge of the men who had lost a moral crusade in the War Between the States. But I have here in my notes, which you are invited to inspect, a score of other incidents which contain no humor at all, and I shall cite only one more to remind you of the seriousness of the problem we’re discussing.
‘In 1892 in Paris, Texas, a black man named Henry Smith ravished and killed the three-year-old daughter of one Henry Vance. No doubt of the crime, no doubt of the guilt, no doubt of the sentence of death. But how was he executed?. He was driven in a wagon through a crowd of ten thousand, then lashed to a chair perched high upon a cotton sledge, from which Vance, the dead girl’s father, asked the horde to be silent while he took his revenge. A small tinner’s furnace was brought to Vance, who heated several soldering irons white-hot. Taking one after another, he started at the prisoner’s bare feet and slowly worked his way up the body, burning off appendages but keeping the torso alive. When he reached the head he burned out the mouth, then extinguished the eyes and punctured the ears. When he felt sated, he offered the irons to anyone else who wanted to share in the revenge, and his fifteen-year-old son took over. Ten thousand cheered.