Michener, James A. (140 page)

Despite the heat, we were scheduled to hold our July meeting in Beaumont, the famous oil city near the Gulf, where we hoped optimistically there might be breezes. I anticipated a productive meeting, since we were to be addressed by Professor Garvey Jaxifer from Red River State College. My staff assured me that he was not inflammatory, only persistent, and I told them: 'Persistence after truth we can live with,' so the meeting was arranged.

I was therefore disturbed when Rusk and Quimper called me on a conference line to ask that I convene an extraordinary two-day meeting prior to Beaumont. I supposed they were going to protest my invitation to Professor Jaxifer, but they assured me that this was not their concern; Rusk growled: 'I've heard the man twice, here in Fort Worth. If he knew figures, I'd hire him. Solid citizen.'

What the improvised meeting was to discuss I could not guess, but at nine one steamy morning Miss Cobb, Professor Garza and I assembled at Austin's Browning Airport for private planes and watched as two jets landed in swift succession. As they taxied toward us I wondered why two were needed, but when the first opened its doors I saw that Lorenzo Quimper had picked up our three staffers from Dallas, so apparently it was going to be an important session.

The conspirators would not tell us where we were going, but shortly we were flying northwest on a route which would take us, I calculated, over Abilene and Lubbock. 'What's this all about?' I asked Quimper, who rode in my plane, and he winked. I guessed that we were going to hold a preliminary session of some kind in a place like Amarillo, but when we had reached that general area and gave no sign of descending, I knew we must be entering New Mexico.

After Quimper served us a choice of drinks and Danish, we began to descend, and soon one of the young men, a better geographer than I, shouted: 'Hey! Santa Fe!'

Flying low, so that we could see the grandest city of the Southwest, we swung north along the highway to Taos, circled a large ranch, and landed on a private strip, macadamized and six thousand feet long. 'Ransom's hacienda,' Quimper announced, and when we joined the others on the tarmac, Rusk said, almost apologetically: 'II Magnifico and I, we thought Texas was just too damned hot. I want you to enjoy two days of relaxation . . . anything you'd like to do. The helicopter's here . . . riding horses . . . swimming . . . great mountain trails. Taos up that way, Santa Fe down there.'

It was the kind of gesture the very rich in Texas like to make. but I noticed that everything about the place was low key pickups with gun racks behind the driver's head, not Mercedes; rough bunkhouses with Hudson's Bay blankets lor cold in no Olympic-sized swimming pool, just a small, friendly dipping place in which the girl from SMU was going to look just . because even if she hadn't brought a swimsuit, Rusk's Mexican housekeeper could offer her a choice of six or seven

It was a splendid break in the heat, for the Rusk ranch v feet high, with magnificent views of mountains higher than 12,-000. But the emotional part of our visit, and 1 use that word with fondest memories, came at dusk on that first day when Quimper signaled his chief pilot to bring before us, as we sat by the pool drinking juleps, four rather long boxes wrapped in gift paper

'Working with you characters,' Lorenzo said, 'has been both an education and a privilege. Never knew I could get along so amiablv with anarchists.' Bowing to Garza, he said: 'On this happy occasion I cannot refrain from sharing my latest Aggie joke. Seems your aviation experts have invented a new type of parachute Opens on impact.'

'I'm walking home,' Garza said, whereupon Lorenzo grabbed him: 'I thought you might, so I brought you just the thing for hiking.'

Shuffling the four parcels, he selected one and handed it to Rusk, who tore off the paper to disclose a long shoebox, inside which rested a pair of incredibly ornate boots. Products of the workmen at the General Quimper Boot Factory, thev had been especially orchestrated, with the front showing a bull of the Texas Longhorn breed Rusk was striving to perpetuate on his Larkin County ranch, the side offering one of his oil derricks, and the back of the boot a fine version of his Leaqet in blue and gold. The retail cost of such masterpieces I did not care to guess, but 1 remembered a catalogue that had offered lesser boots at three thousand dollars.

We were still awed by Rusk's gift when Miss Cobb opened hers to reveal a tell, slim pair ideally suited to her grave demeanor They were silver and gray, with not a bit of ornamentation to detract from the exquisite patterning of the leather itself; it seemed to have been sculpted in eleven subtle shades of gray.

'What kind of leather?' the young woman from SMU cried, and Quimper replied with obvious pride in his men's workmanship: 'Amazon boa constrictor.' They were once-in-a-lifetime boots, and Miss Cobb was so touched by Lorenzo's gesture that she did not allow herself to speak lest she behave in a sentimental manner ill-befitting her Cobb ancestry.

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 Efrain 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 adobe 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 can 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 d< 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 theorv 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 Garvev, who had lectured American blacks about their destmv 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 con-quistadores, 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 Karan-kawa, 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. Thev continue to affect all relations between the two races

The ante-bellum legend is that the slaves were happv in their servitude, that they did not seek freedom, and that thev did not warrant it because they had no skills other than chopping 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 Properlv 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. 1 can speak of this with some authority, because mv 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.'