If You Knew South Texas

A drive from San Antonio into the tiny towns of South Texas means passing miles and miles of stark, stuck-in-time landscape, replete with tumbleweeds and cacti. Dead armadillos are a given. Ditto deer heads at your local rest stop.

My late mother was a fifth-grade teacher from Alice, Texas, about 45 minutes west of Corpus, two and a half hours southwest of San Antonio. Although I know the names Violet, Three Rivers, Robstown and Kingsville intimately, I had not heard the name Uvalde until the tragedy the other day.

But that didn’t stop me from living the experience as I would have in Alice, when as an eight year-old I was ruminating in a summer school math class, miserable, missing my dad; or when I was a four year-old running from bats on Northwood Street or being pulled in the red wagon by next-door neighbor Mickey Hans. I had also lived with my grandparents Mama Sue and Pop, and "Unkie" Norman for the summer I turned one, while my parents visited my paternal relatives on the east coast. Pop would die of pancreatic cancer when I was just three and a half.

I quickly checked to see how the Alice churchgoers and townsfolk I followed on social media were handling the tragedy. There was a prayer vigil, with a picture of a little Hispanic girl that read: “Am I Next?” Someone should have told her not to smile, because the image was chilling and one immediately feared for her psychological well being. I was baptised at Alice First Baptist Church, age 10, where Mom had sang soprano in the choir and Mama Sue played piano and taught Vacation Bible School. I remember her once whispering in my ear from the pew, that so-and-so used so much perfume because she hadn’t bathed.

That is Texas.

Texas is also a place where one can find an older man with a rifle behind her home, scaring her Yankee daughter by phone to the point that she calls the police in Alice, who investigate but report he was not doing anything wrong.

Relative: “He was probably a hunter who got lost.”

Mom owned a beautiful house with an expansive pool, and behind it part of the land including the alley where the man was technically trespassing. Apparently, he didn’t know, or so it was determined. I worried, as I always worried about my seventysomething mother alone in this gun-happy state.

And yet … my grandfather Pop, learned superintendent of Alice schools, was a hunter. As a child I sometimes slept in my uncles’ room (Unkie still lived at home), on a twin bed, to wake up and see a deer head peering at me. This was and is perfectly natural. What’s not natural in Texas is putting away your guns or your Bible.

I gave up my Christianity several years ago, and yet, when I lived in Alice for seven months from 2016-2017 I felt the urge to sing “Onward Christian Soldiers” at the top of my lungs. Mom and I went to church several times including on Easter, followed by a brunch at the Country Club, which is considered a special treat, out by the golf course. Mom posed in a yellow top, looking slim and youthful, as the gentleman for whom a lake was named after, stopped to say hello. Mr. Findley would die not that long after, and then I’d lose my mom due to probable hospital error after she moved up to Waco.

I cannot watch too much of the coverage of the children and the teachers who perished. I live 51 minutes from Sandy Hook and lived two hours and 51 minutes from Uvalde when I was in Alice. Those of us here in Connecticut still feel each moment of that painful day whenever we see the name of the town, whether they are playing ours in sports or whether one is applying for a job there. Sandy Hook will always be our Columbine.

When the Uvalde schoolchildren and teachers were shot and killed, I thought of Alice and my own experience in their elementary classrooms. I saw the coverage on CNN and started to wail when I saw the landscape, the way the trees, streets, and big sky looks in that part of the world, the Stetsons on the heads of the cops. Now that people are out to get the cops and their decisionmakers who kept them from storming the classroom quickly, I shake my head: ‘Doesn’t surprise me.’ Whether it was my mom’s prolapse surgery, in which an instrument was dropped in her insides and so she was in for six and a half hours rather than what should have been half that, or whether it was her untimely death following her catheterization, or whether it was the wayward rifleman on her property, I just know too well how it is there.

Is it a lack of sophistication? A cowboy mentality that puts machismo over proper decision-making? Another aspect: this is a very Hispanic region now and while they are expected to learn English, we Gringos have never been expected to learn Spanish. This can create communication breakdowns, and that can result in tragic consequences. Mama Sue had a Spanish-speaking housekeeper, Ramona, whom I adored and who introduced me to how enchiladas should really taste. She came once a week to clean my grandmother’s home, which was a good thing because for all her brilliance as a geometry teacher, she still allowed roaches to creep into the back of the fridge.

If you knew South Texas like I do, you would be watching or reading the news with not only horror but a clearer understanding of why they will never put two and two together when it comes to gun control. When I wrote to someone from the church, she responded that the killer probably hadn’t purchased the gun himself. I realized in that moment that whatever I said had to be tempered with an understanding that this very Christian gun-owning populus must be spoken to appropriately: not talked down to, but gently, respectfully, prodded into change.

I believe the way to get through to the folks in Texas who would vote for Abbott instead of O’Rourke is relatively simple: Respect where they are coming from. In the words of the late, great Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb in his skin and walk around in it.”