The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts (8 page)

The border inspires metaphor with its dissonance, displaying both concrete markings of its existence—a fence, a river, a Border Patrol truck—and an intangible impact on every facet of life in its proximity. The border puts the people on its edges in the constant practice of making comparisons. Depending on where you look, the alteration between one side and the other can be easy or impossible to perceive. Some differences are only a matter of degrees, such as the corruption that undercuts politics and business. But the differences can be arrestingly obvious, too, as when you cross the international bridge, striding from one country into the next, and encounter the smooth-faced teenager with a machine gun, his
hand close to the trigger, or the group of Central American teenagers bounding across the highway and into the brush as they attempt to cross the river undetected.

Before I moved to Brownsville, I visited for a job interview at
The Brownsville Herald
. During that trip, a photographer from the paper took me to a friend's barbecue, where I met an environmental activist named Matt, who had moved to Brownsville from Minnesota after visiting with a college course that examined the environmental impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement. If I was taking a leap in moving to a border town for my first job, Matt was jumping blindfolded: with neither an official job nor independent wealth, he subsisted mainly off coffee and cigarettes that year, slowly losing muscle mass, and using his diminishing funds to pay for gas, rent in a seedy apartment, and cat food for two mangy strays he'd taken in. Matt invited me to come to Matamoros the next day with a reporter from the
San Antonio Express-News
who was writing a story about the garbage dump. I met him, the reporter, her photographer, and Domingo, a veteran environmentalist that Matt was informally learning from, near the international bridge. Together we drove across the river.

I had no sense of the size of Matamoros. I thought it would be a quick trip, but after we crossed the bridge we drove for more than twenty minutes through the dense city. The streets were clogged with cars and buses and pedestrians. People stood in the middle of intersections selling bags of nuts and potato chips and washing the windshields of cars with soapy water from plastic bottles. There were strip malls with grocery stores and movie theaters, love motels with cheesy neon signs, and horses grazing from strips of grass
next to Pemex stations. There were houses made of found wood and sheet metal and mansions behind tall gates, and canals filled with garbage, and goats roasting on spits in storefront windows and hand-painted signs on buses, and schools with throngs of children in starched uniforms and people making long journeys home on foot along the edges of busy roads.

We drove out into a
colonia
, a neighborhood somewhere between a suburb and a slum. The roads transformed from potholed pavement to caliche to straight-up dirt. Ash from trash fires sparked the air. Finally we drove to the mountain of garbage. A rotten, burned brew of trash seeped into the car and our clothes. It smelled toxic. We saw the
pepenadores
, the trash pickers, who made their livelihoods collecting what they could from the piles. Children helped their parents pick through the hazardous junk for valuable metals or an unopened can of food or a pair of pants. We went to the neighborhood next to the garbage dump and met its residents. Everything in their homes—from the building materials to the food on the table—was scavenged from the dump. It was one of the most logical things I'd ever seen: an entire community living from a pile of discarded supplies.

That trip had a profound effect on my understanding of the border ever after. The sudden transition from one country to the next was astounding. No matter how poor Brownsville was in relation to the rest of the United States, I had seen the other comparison just across the bridge. The river snaked between the two countries, carving the curved edges of puzzle pieces. They interlocked, complicating each other, begging the answers to unspoken questions such as, how do we measure poverty? How does examining an alter
native way of life help us to better understand ourselves, and what are the limits of that understanding? The trip made me want to stay, to begin discovering more of those questions.

Sometimes I'd talk to people in Brownsville who told me they hadn't crossed the bridge to Matamoros in decades. They'd be standing literally blocks from the river as they said this, but they regarded me with contempt: to them, visiting was a fool's errand, an outright request for trouble. I thought they were the ones missing out. A much bigger city, attracting world-class concerts, with more regal public spaces, more urgent and compelling stories for journalists, and access to many other points south, was sitting at their doorstep. Many people in Brownsville visited Matamoros more often than I did, even daily, and argued that the cities were really part of a single region that was falsely divided by a political line. But the division had recently become explicit. The rust-colored border fence had transformed the local aesthetic, and a pastoral landscape had become a broadly gated prison.

As the violence in the Mexican cities bordering the Rio Grande Valley began to increase sharply in 2010 when the Zetas Cartel split off from the previously dominant Gulf Cartel in the state of Tamaulipas, I started to feel the same fear of entering Mexico. The claims of oneness were quieted by gun battles. Bumper stickers reading
NO BORDER WALL
could still be seen around town, even though construction was under way.

Matamoros was one of a few places John had visited outside Brownsville. He may never have been on an airplane, but he had that basis of comparison to life in a foreign country, something many in the United States never experience firsthand. Angela grew up in
Matamoros and moved to Harlingen when she was about eleven years old. John and Angela loved their children, they had access to shelter and a soup kitchen, food stamps and medical treatment. As John has said many times since, they knew where they could go if they lost the apartment. They had more tools than some to support a little family, even though on the scale of US poverty, they were decidedly at the bottom. On this side of the border, they were sheltered from the extortion, lack of basic infrastructure, and institutional corruption that define life for many of the poor in Matamoros.

Maybe it would have taken years and medication and sobriety for John to become the father the children needed. I wanted to ask him questions about drugs and responsibility and the meaning of fatherhood, but it seemed cruel. These were the memories, whether they were truths or half-truths, keeping him alive in jail
.
He knew that he loved his family and that he was a good dad, at least compared to the standard that had been set by Angela's abusive former boyfriend or John's own father.

At trial, Dr. Brams testified that John had developed a superhero complex as a child, to try to control a world that was falling down around him. He was “a powerless little boy feeling powerful.” John referenced this idea in one of his letters.

My family tell me I have a habit of sacrificing myself to please others, some friends have told me I have a superhero complx because I just have to help those I see in need.

CHAPTER 6

The Quiet Dead

Does my soul with its rich wealth of affections, its unsatisfied yearnings for good, end all its strugglings in the same grave where the body returns to death?

—
HELEN CHAPMAN, 1851

I
t was a brisk day in Brownsville, unseasonably cool, and Professor Anthony Knopp and I were walking through the Old City Cemetery talking about the city's history. The cemetery, measuring a city block, is located on a small, sloping hill, close to downtown. It's protected by a brick wall, painted white, and the surrounding neighborhood is a labyrinth of one-way streets and alleys. The city's wealthy were historically buried here on the top of an incline. At the crest of the hill, gaudy mausoleums, intricate headstones, gated family plots, and towering statues called out the names of the dead. At the base lay the anonymous graves of those who couldn't pay for burial. Legend has it that when Hurricane Beulah tore through the city, these bodies were dredged up.

The low wall around the cemetery's perimeter presented little impediment to intruders, and many of the graves had been ransacked for jewelry. The plots maintained their eerie beauty, but
there was sadness, too: The dead were defenseless. Anything could be taken from them, no matter how grand the burial. Their memories could be cherished or discarded depending on the fickle attentions of the living.

Knopp is Brownsville's local-history expert. He came here in his thirties, having studied Mexican history in college, and though he had since retired, he seemed to cling to his work in the manner of a smoker who allows himself a cigarette a day. Knopp was seventy-one when we took that walk around the cemetery, and wrinkles lightly imprinted his skin, like a delicate piece of paper that had been crumpled up and smoothed out again. His eyes were blue, but not bright. When he was excited about an idea and emotion was in his voice, those eyes sparkled and belied a more youthful man. He wore thin-framed glasses, muted sweaters, and favored jeans and sneakers when more professional attire was not required. He still taught one class at the local university, despite his frustration at the mostly uninterested students, and lived for the rare disciple who was truly intrigued by local history. Knopp knew how fertile the territory was for such a scholar. He came here from Minnesota, and Brownsville's historical intrigue (along with two marriages) had kept him anchored since.

For those who say Brownsville and Matamoros are artificially divided, a view from the air would confirm them as a single sprawling city, separated only by the jagged line of the river. But not much more than sparsely populated scrubland, farms, and palm forests were on the northern banks of the Rio Grande until Texas gave up its status as an independent republic and became the twenty-eighth US state in 1845. In retrospect, the annexation appears to be strug
gling President John Tyler's proudest achievement.
Tyler, for whom the street where the murders took place was named, was referred to derisively as “his Accidency,” having landed the presidency only after William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia (along with the cruel medical “treatments” of the time), after just thirty-two days in office. Tyler was not the ally that Harrison's Whig Party had hoped. His ascendancy to the presidency led to a public feud, complete with the nation's first impeachment attempt and threats of assassination. Aside from Tyler's achievement of annexing Texas, he is barely remembered and has become one of the most obscure presidents in US history. In Brownsville, Tyler is not so highly revered as to rate a street name; he is the recipient due to a grid pattern, whereby numbered streets intersect with those named for US presidents in the chronological order of their time in office, from George Washington—closest to Mexico—up to Zachary Taylor. The streets that intersect are numbered, so if you can remember the presidential order, your coordinates are easy to place.

Mexico had grudgingly agreed to accept Texas's independence on the condition it did not join the United States. After the annexation, the piece of riverbank that would become Brownsville was suddenly of strategic importance, as part of disputed territory, and General Zachary Taylor was sent here through scrubland with three thousand soldiers.

How had the city's power structure emerged and, with it, the divisions between the haves and have-nots—the Rubios among the latter group?
Knopp told me that many of the wealthiest couples in the city have historically been unions between Anglo men who came to South Texas to find military victory or fortune, and the
daughters of prominent Mexican families, many of them of direct Spanish descent, who had seen their country become part of the United States when Texas was annexed. To this day, there is a significant divide in Brownsville between the small upper-class contingent—many of whom descend from these early families—and new immigrants who have come to Brownsville to escape more extreme poverty in Mexico and stop in the valley before continuing north, sometimes staying permanently.

These legacies of inequality are tied to the architecture that remains. The jacales
,
where peasants lived, are no more, their materials too fragile to hold up. Now, wood homes, some just two or three rooms, sometimes built from improvised materials, dominate the area. The historical buildings that endure are the homes of wealthy and middle-class inhabitants, the places of business they built, and the military barracks.

Knopp took me to the site of Fort Texas, an earthen hexagon with nine-foot walls, erected in the absence of construction materials in 1846. Little is left of the original fort now, but you can still see the rise of the earth, a man-made addendum to the landscape. When Major Jacob Brown died in battle, it was renamed Fort Brown in his honor. Around 1848, the newly forming city was also named for the major, who provided centuries of unfortunate associations.
Brown
, as Knopp mused, invokes an aesthetic quality more commonly seen in the stretches of Texas border in the desert westward. Brownsville might be called Subtropicalville or Palm City were it named on the basis of looks.

Once the city was established, bricks were locally produced to build a proper barracks a half mile from those earthen walls. Over
the next century, soldiers came to Fort Brown, bringing bits of the outside world with them. One such artifact was Helen Chapman, the wife of the first quartermaster at Fort Brown. Helen, a ninety-seven-pound New Englander, had a thin-lipped smile, pale skin, and straight brown hair that hung close to her cheeks. Her defining feature was a set of attentive dark-brown eyes, round and searching, serious but soft.

Knopp advised me to pick up Helen's letters, edited by her great-great-grandson. In a classic frontier narrative, Helen struck out from New York on the USS
Massachusetts
in January 1848, on her own apart from the company of a few other military wives, to join her husband in Matamoros. The sea voyage took seventeen days. In Helen's regular dispatches from the border, she told her mother both the simple details of her days—“they have delicious oranges here and I eat one every morning before breakfast”—and about politics, frontier life, and the plight of the Mexican poor.

Helen quickly adopted a bold attitude toward life in this unstable land. No summer was too hot, no disputed terrain too dangerous, no epidemic too dire. She came to thrive on this novel, renegade life.

“You must ask among yourselves why I am not afraid to go out in a country so insecure,” Helen tells her mother. “I do not quite understand it myself, but I can tell you frankly and honestly that I do not know what fear is. I seem to have made up my mind that no soft indolent drawing room life is for me, that though exempt from actual labor, I must constantly be thrown into circumstances requiring activity, decisions and fearlessness.”

Helen was troubled by the poverty she saw around her and worried about the welfare of the Mexican peasants. She experienced the
epidemics that seized the frontier populations, such as cholera, and watched as nearly every family mourned a loss when the outbreak haunted the land, bearing its indiscriminate scythe. Her compulsion to describe the nuances of her day-to-day to her family back home made her the best chronicler of life on this stretch of the border during that transformative time, at least that we know of today.

Yet Helen's ideas would not have been regarded as consequential during her own time, due to her gender, which guaranteed her a subordinate station to the men who surrounded her. Though her views may have been influential among elected officials, and with future-president Taylor, Helen would not be the one remembered for their impact. Once she departed from the frontier, her legacy evaporated. There is no Helen Chapman Hall in Brownsville, and though the home where she lived in Fort Brown was recently reassembled, it was not done in tribute to her life, but because it could house an office and blend in with the other historic architecture on a college campus. General Taylor and Helen's devoted husband might have held her in high esteem, but definitions of noteworthy at that time did not include the wife.

It took 150 years for Helen's descendants to compile
The News from Brownsville
. Had her letters been lost, we would not know the history of the border as we do today
.
Helen's letters are a reminder of all the other narratives we are missing from this period—those native to the region, and those who did not have access to Helen's education. What remains is but a thimbleful of insight compared to what is lost.

As any cook will tell you, time is a powerful ingredient, altering profoundly the substance that it acts upon. What might become of
the building on East Tyler Street if it was left undisturbed for reexamination in a century or more? Like Helen's writings, the building is not traditionally considered historic, or important, or educational today. But legacy cannot be realized without the passage of time, and the ability to synthesize the surrounding places and events into context. As I read Helen's letters, I thought of what might become of the building many years in the future. Maybe it could serve as an example of the atrocities that can occur when the system fails those in need, or what did or did not qualify as “insanity” in the legal system of this time, or what can become of a place when compassion is projected onto it instead of fear and hatred. But such a legacy would require the transformation of the way we currently evaluate modern events and would require our culture to prioritize time, and therefore hindsight, over more immediate concerns. Maybe it's not realistic to ask those of us living in the now to put a hypothetical future before our urgent necessities.

What would Helen think of the Brownsville of today, a place that men of wealth in her time predicted would rival New Orleans? She observed the divide of the muddy river, the Rio Grande, which separated Mexico's peasants from the northern wanderers who had been drawn here by a sense of possibility. Brownsville at that time was a potent, exciting land of opportunity, a flaming match that might be put to gasoline and combust, or simply burn out. The names of some of those businessmen—Stillman, Kenedy, King, McAllen—are still plastered around the Rio Grande Valley. Their descendants own land, businesses, and, to varying degrees, use that authority to drive public discourse and investment. Some of their names also populate the graveyard where Knopp and I walked
together, though the remains of many wealthy citizens were eventually moved to the newer, more fashionable cemetery.

As for Fort Brown, it was never empty for long. Local landowner Juan Cortina's 1859 invasion of Brownsville caused troops to return to defend the city. During the Civil War, in 1863, Confederate soldiers set a fire in an attempt to prevent Union soldiers from seizing the fort. The fire quickly spread to Brownsville's downtown. The fort remained a contested site, due to its strategic importance for cotton shipping. Nearby Palmito Ranch was the site of the final battle of the Civil War, on May 13, 1865, more than a month after General Robert E. Lee's surrender.

Soldiers worked steadily to rebuild the fort, constructing dozens of new buildings. Many of these, which went beyond pure utility and had real beauty, are now part of the local community college. The old hospital is a pristine example of border architecture. Hand-fired bricks create a pleasing mosaic of peach, red, and sand, and covered porches with graceful arches encircle the building, providing protection from the sun. Now the fort is a jewel of the city, but during its heyday, it was an isolated, dangerous place. Soldiers died frequently after catching diseases from water taken from the Rio Grande. Food was hard to get, and soldiers dined on rotten bacon or flour that had been raided by mice. Helen, who did not imbibe, was shocked by the raging alcoholism of the soldiers, and fatal duels between armed men in the streets. Today, the fort is a carefully restored and often-visited center of education and local pride. Then, it was a stage for death.

Once the infrastructure of the fort was improved, its most peaceful era began. More illness, including a yellow fever epidemic, imperiled soldiers, but there were no battles.

Shortly after the turn of the century, a railroad was built through the city, connecting it to Mexico. The population swelled in response, and the use of irrigation helped the region's crops become more profitable.

In 1906, the city became a flashpoint in the national press when news spread of what would become known as the Brownsville Affair, the details of which remain disputed today. A battalion of African-American soldiers had been stationed at the fort, and on a sweltering mid-August night, gunshots were heard throughout the downtown, killing a bartender and a horse, and wounding a town constable. The white commanders of the Twenty-Fifth Regiment said that all soldiers were accounted for and were asleep in their bunks. But the townspeople produced used bullet cartridges that matched the soldiers' weaponry. All 167 infantrymen were dismissed by the army, despite the fact that none had been found guilty of wrongdoing.