Working nights in a hospital the noise level can be surprisingly
high. My preferred patient population is babies which means a lot of crying but
the shrieks can usually be managed by a bottle of formula or the intervention
of a boob. Lately my patients have all been adults in moderately bad shape
and what they talk about at midnight and beyond—past the hour when most
hospitals will give out sleeping pills, which is 2 a.m. The conversation in the patient's room can be pretty
wide-ranging and informative. Or not. Some things you don’t really want to hear, but other subjects are more entertaining. Had a lady a little while ago
with breast cancer which had gone away and come back. She
said that her history teacher back in the day at Fulmore Middle School was
future Governor Ann Richards. “She was really funny,” this lady
said, the only time the patient smiled in our interactions over the course of
one very long weekend. Otherwise she had a flat affect and wouldn’t take any
pain medication which can be a bad sign, even refusing the kind of pills that
usually cheer people up.
Another patient about the same time who had a stroke mentioned
his roots in Texas went back to revolutionary days and included slaveholders.
You hear a lot of family history in a hospital because there may not be much
future for the people talking or they think not and also because—one
supposes—some folks, seeing the end, whether it’s looming or not, are
trying to come to terms with their forbearers. In order to figure out their own
place in the parade of life. It was the second patient more than the first who
helped me to come to terms with my lineage as an African American in this
Southern state. My people or my father’s people come from Washington
County, county seat Brenham, in the Brazos River valley, on the road between
Houston and Austin. My great-grandfather was also named Lucius and was born a
slave in Austin County next door to Washington County where he was sold or
moved and was later sentenced to prison for murder, twenty years after
Emancipation. That's all the background you need. My grandfather and
father—Lucius II and Lucius III, respectively—were born in Brenham and in
Houston, respectively, but not in any kind of bondage and were not
destined to do fieldwork. Everyone on my father’s side of the family turned to
crime, actually, a step up from slavery, actually. My own preference today would
be to say that they were “economic freedom fighters” or “proprietary
insurgents against The Man,” something like that, in the modern context of the
civil rights struggle, which includes discussion of money and lately
reparations. They were in it for the money.
In their own way my ancestors did not accept white privilege, to use the terminology of our present more enlightened debate. My family history as slaves doesn’t obsess me or anything but every time the name Brenham pops up, my ears prick up. Antebellum Texas was a long time ago and most of my day today is more concerned with what white people are up to now. Which you do have to continue to watch out for, here in the Lone Star State. Because Caucasians seem to have been caught once or twice but not stopped trying, you feel me?
Through the years however, half-attentively—the members of my family have collected quite a little dossier on Brenham, our former hometown, and the content of the file is not good. It has nothing to do with the high prices at the bed-and-breakfasts, in picturesque Washington-on-the-Brazos, or even the recent listeria scare at Blue Bell Ice Cream which is manufactured there and that Brenham is best known for today. Not to be a hypocrite either. Dutch Chocolate and the occasional spoonful of Rocky Road have passed my lips. There will be no suggestion of BDS (boycott, divestiture and sanction, like in the Middle East) but there’s no product endorsement of anything that comes out of Washington County either. Anyway this guy—the patient with the stroke—added to my understanding of Brenham’s pre-ice cream economy and also explained something from a book of the period that had perplexed me back in the day. He said that the Brazos River valley was cotton country, the original Texas plantation economy, and what made the state part of Dixie so to speak. Don’t know if that’s totally true but it makes a certain sense, being fertile river bottom land and all.
Tenting on the Plains was written by Libby Custer—wife of George Armstrong Custer, who at the time of Libby's writing had just had his fateful final encounter with the Sioux. General Custer was military governor in Texas immediately after the Civil War and Libby wrote that Union officers arriving in Texas for occupation duty after the Civil War usually landed at Galveston, by steamboat from New Orleans, and took a train to Brenham, where the tracks ended, and were met by a string of horses for the ride to Austin. That’s because apparently there was only one rail line at the time west of the Mississippi, the one between Galveston and Brenham. That’s the story we are told. And it carried cotton from the plantations to the port to be shipped. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The economy was what it was, its best-known product was called King Cotton for a reason. Mother’s family was from Galveston, by the way. She was born during Jim Crow, her grandfather arrived from Jamaica to work on the docks a little after the Custers arrived with another aim, in post-bellum Texas, to make a better life. Cotton endured even if the Confederacy did not. So, like, it was almost as if the most famous agricultural product of the South brought together the two sides of a black family—in the sheets, presumably fine Texas cotton—and on the docks. My belief is that slavery and Jim Crow and even discrimination today has never been about skin color. It’s all about money. My feeling about Galveston is that it’s a great town. My forbearers were paid for their labor on the dock, however little that may have been, and my attitude is kind of, like, “Brenham bad, Galveston good,” which is not a very sophisticated view but there it is. The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston awarded my degree which is also a big plus on the Galveston side because it relates to a paycheck, our subject here. During the time of my studies the only prejudice was Galveston’s B.O.I. vs. not B.O.I. distinction—"Born on the Island,” or not. Which people do hold against you if you weren’t born on the right end of the Houston causeway. But has nothing to do with skin color. Whereas Brenham—you couldn’t pay me to spend the night, so we’ll never know. Or you could pay me which is what this is about.
Years ago a famous Galveston resident named Schwartz, who was
state senator, and Jewish, and B.O.I., said that all modern relationships on
Galveston Island are based upon who your family sheltered with during the 1900
hurricane, that killed at least 6,000 people, still the largest single natural
disaster in American history. During the storm you stayed with whoever had
a house with strong walls or a foundation above waterline, again, irrespective
of race. Brenham’s great disaster on the other hand was a fire, and it was set
intentionally, not an act of nature or an act of God although one likes to
think the Supreme Being, looking down, was smiling.
1866 right after the Civil War and Yankee troops of
the army of occupation got drunk one night and torched the town. The
Washington County Historical Society or whoever makes a big deal about the fire.
Personally though this fire—or the fact that there was a fire—which took out
the whole town or most of the town—is totally okay with me. My view of the
state’s history is that there wasn’t enough burning, actually, either
during the Civil War or immediately thereafter. How can you reconstruct—as in
Reconstruction—if things haven’t been destroyed in the first place? Fire cleanses, not
to be puritanical or anything. A little more flame and ash would have
been a good thing for the state, actually, that’s my unsolicited professional opinion
now. But in Texas only Brenham got the full cure.
Washington County State Bank was the oldest ongoing financial
concern in Texas until a few years ago when it was bought by a holding
company. If my ancestors’ wages, that they never received as slaves, had been invested
at even 2 percent, my nights now would not be spent changing diapers
or wiping drool on babies or adults. Not that there’s anything
wrong with that, it’s honorable work, you hear some interesting things as
you slather on the butt cream. But there are better ways to spend one’s
evenings than wiping front to back. That is my point. Btw, Brenham has always
had, one way or another—using slave labor or, today, selling ice cream—a pretty
vibrant little economy. “Despite a brief reign of terror by the Ku Klux Klan in
the 1920s,” the Handbook of Texas informs us, “merchandising,
marketing, and processing industries enabled the town to preserve its position
as a regional economic center between 1910 and the 1950s.” Happily today
in its post-Klan incarnation Brenham continues to make a buck. Anytime
events leave me down and depressed—opening Libby Custer’s book and reading
about the Union Army crossing the Sabine River cheers me up. Were the Union troops
carrying torches? One would think so, but apparently not. Happily still there
was a price for being on the wrong side of human rights. Even if you got a
county or a school named after you later.
A footnote: General John Bell Hood for example was the most prominent of the Lone Star rebel commanders and namesake of what was Fort Hood and Hood County, Texas. George Custer fell into conversation with the defeated Confederate on the boat to New Orleans just after the Civil War ended, they were both West Point men it seems. Old college ties and all that, there was no hostility between the two, Libby noted in her journal that General Hood was a poor sight to see, all shot to hell—he had lost an arm—and even worse he had lost the battle for Atlanta and his reputation was in tatters. As a rule, Texans don’t care how you win but you do have to win and General Hood had not. He got his comeuppance, in other words, not to be puritanical, just as George Custer would get his comeuppance in Dakota at the hands of the Sioux. Both white men making the wrong choice about white privilege, you could say. So, like—everybody gets taken care of eventually, by history or by life. The disputes about people’s reputations only elicit a big yawn from me. Especially at four o’clock in the morning, making rounds with a package of Pull-Ups. The Rebels all got the cure we all get eventually. They were proven wrong by a change in values or by the unending irrelevancy of being dead. But the land, especially this land, that’s another thing. Texas never got the full cure. Except Brenham. And there, like my lady who never smiled in the hospital, the cancer came back.
Brenham is about 25 miles from Hempstead in Waller County where Sandra Bland just hanged herself in a jail cell. Waller County borders Washington County, my ancestral home. The state trooper who arrested Sandra Bland for, basically, being black and talking back to a white man, was a newbie with the Texas Department of Public Safety. His prior job was as an “ingredients supervisor” at Blue Bell ice cream factory in picturesque Brenham, not that there’s anything wrong with that either. My favorite flavor is Cookies n’ Cream, btw, and my theory of race relations is kind of like one of those pints of ice cream, dark chunks of rich chocolate in what otherwise would be plain vanilla? Apply any heat whatsoever and there’s a meltdown. Instead of delicious dark sweetener, some people get treated like bacteria in the vat, which is what happened to Sandra Bland. Of course that doesn’t account for all the other people of color in Texas, there are other flavors, so to speak. My theory has not completely been worked out, you have to give me a little latitude here, regarding Brenham however the facts are incontrovertible—there's absolutely no fucking doubt. There’s just something about the town. You may say that you can’t stereotype an entire geographic area of a huge state like Texas but if you could, Washington County would be the place to start. That would be my whole point, actually.
