June 28, 2020 – “I was born in a small town in East Texas. I was raised in a combination between Dallas, Texas and Calgary, Canada, went to school for a long time in Austin, Texas, then moved to Los Angeles where I’ve lived for a long time – that’s the long version of what I say when people ask me where I’m from. In these later years of my life, that statement has changed. I’ve started crediting only Los Angeles and East Texas. The version I say now to the question of where I am from is simply, I’ve lived in Los Angeles most of my life, but I was born in a small town in East Texas. What is the expression? You can take the girl out of the trailer park, but you can’t take the trailer park out of the girl? No, East Texas is not a trailer park, but it’s just so very fundamental to my life, to my thoughts and soul, that it never leaves, even if every other place does leave my little summary.
What it is.
I had my guitar lesson this past week. I’ve had small discussions with my teacher about my little lots and lands. No doubt, my need to own such things as rural land comes from my East Texas soul, my roots. My guitar teacher was a bit snarky and said something about my six houses. Really, seriously? I don’t have six houses. I do have more than one house, yes, but none of them would anyone want. Except to tear down, people want them for that. Yep, the solicitations to buy my “property”, real estate investor code for my house I live in, are now reaching my cell phone. No, I’m not going to sell my almost hundred-year old dumb house with its amazing lot where I’ve lived for decades to an investor to tear down, but yep, as usual I digress. Answering the guitar teacher, I said I don’t have six houses. I have one, the one I live in, which needs to be rebuilt, and it has a mortgage, and any second I can’t pull money out of my ass to pay for it, I will lose it. So it’s not mine. I have another house that I owe $6,000 on in a rural place in northern New Mexico, and that house is not structurally sound. And I have another, co-owned with my brother, inherited from my grandmother, in a small town in East Texas where I’m originally from, called Quitman, I said. I then listed my various vacant lots and tracts of land, most in crazy places, most that will be a challenge to do anything with, and one of those also has a mortgage too. The recitation didn’t seem to quell the six house thing, but what was striking was that I got a question about Quitman. He asked where is that. I answered with a technicality – 90 miles east of Dallas; I said it’s where I’m originally from. Then I felt weird, I’m not sure why, but just said “you’ll never go there, it’s not a place for people from here to go visit.” And that’s the truth, nobody outside of people who live there will ever go there. Well, people from Dallas go there, but that’s another story.
It’s not the first time I got a question like that either. One time, I had an appearance before a judge. I can’t remember how it came up, but we were discussing the lack of cell phone reception in places. I said I have places where there is no cell phone reception. Heck, that actually includes my own house, but people don’t really understand that. I brought up my stay in Quitman, the last time I was there overnight. It was a really long time ago. My grandmother had passed, and I was supposed to go to the florist in Quitman to get flowers for the funeral. Quitman has a really cute florist, by the way, located in a really cute house with great décor. It was about 11:30 a.m., when the phone rang. The phone is a really old landline, we don’t have it now, but then we still maintained the line. The phone itself is in a phone cubby in the hall. I dragged myself out of the bed, and went to the phone, did the best “Hello” I could muster. My sister on the other end of the line said “are you asleep?” I said no, no, of course not. Then began the frenzy that was flower shopping, I needed to order them before noon. I told that story to the judge, and the judge’s only reaction was, “can I go there?” He was serious. East Texas is like that. It’s homey like that.
East Texas is rural. But it’s not. There are little towns about every ten miles, with roads between them, highways, and also if you know how to use them, small roads that are paved in crude oil, think soft asphalt. Those roads used to have wooden bridges over the creeks. My grandfather took me fishing on those bridges with cane poles. There are little communities on the small roads. Some of those communities used to have little schools or churches. Most still have their cemetery – places where generations of people, all related, are buried. My mother and grandmother are buried in those. Generations of my family are too. I know every grave; my grandfather taught me. There are strings of rural places lining the roads, little farms, or homes all along the way. There are fruit stands. Fireworks stands. And every little place has its families, its history.
Quitman is one of those towns. It’s a nice town. It has pretty much everything you would want – a florist, a good hamburger place; there’s a frozen yogurt machine in the grocery store. Most of the houses are nice. It’s a county seat, so you can get your driver’s license there. It takes literally six months to get an appointment in Dallas, so my nephew got his driver’s license in Quitman – the test being to drive around the square, stop at the one stop light. Last week, my sister’s husband took his daughter to Quitman to get her learner’s permit. Mind you, Quitman never got into his soul; he never goes, and he doesn’t dally, but he did drive past my grandmother’s house. It’s a long story, but he has always wanted “his” money out of it, sell the house so he can have money to spend on his own mortgaged house. Not on my watch. You never sell real estate. I heard those words out of my nephew the last time I saw him; they are mine, probably a reaction to my family losing so much. Ah, the things we pass down. I did hear that my sister’s husband and my niece passed through Mineola, the next town over, to get bar-b-que. It’s the best, I think, and they have amazing bread pudding there.
One town over from Mineola is Hawkins. My brother and I have a one-acre vacant tract of land between those two towns, Mineola and Hawkins. We call it “the farm”. Once upon a time, my family’s farm was between Quitman and Alba – the opposite direction. Alba is by Golden; Kasey Musgraves is from Golden. She named her last record after Golden. The other side of Mineola is Lindale; Miranda Lambert is from there. As for Hawkins, I never made it to Hawkins much, but the trees there are better than on the Alba side of Quitman, and the side roads between Mineola and Hawkins to Quitman have the prettiest farms I’ve ever seen, with stone barns and things. Trees and stone barns are really good.
Why am I telling you all of this when , like my guitar teacher, none of you are likely to ever go to these places? Because I wanted you to understand the little towns and their environment, so you could understand why I was excited to see Hawkins in the news this week.
Aunt Jemima. That’s now a racist thing. Mind you, on my shopping trip to Walmart yesterday, I bought both the pancake mix and the syrup. I’m going to make waffles with it, while I still can. There was a lot of it on the shelf. Perhaps people won’t buy it now. But I learned a new thing about Aunt Jemima.
Perhaps it was named for a racial stereotype. Perhaps it depicts a racial stereotype, in today’s version of normal, that is. But when it was made, the company enlisted models to portray Aunt Jemima. One of the most significant of those models, one who had this role for 23 years, was a woman from Hawkins. There’s a sign in Hawkins in honor of this woman. There’s a historical marker in “Foukes”, which is basically one of those former communities that is now just a cemetery, her original home. Foukes is down the street on an oil road from my one-acre farm located between Mineola and Hawkins. Oh and in case your curious, Lake Hawkins (many of these little towns have their own lake), is amazing – pretty sandy beaches, huge piney woods, and nice houses on small hills overlooking the water.
As for the news story — the good people of Hawkins, including the descendants of this Aunt Jemima spokeswoman from Hawkins, don’t want the brand name changed. Her living cousin says changing the name takes away something of her own history.
This week, I’ve thought a lot about names, about words. My own name. David Lee Roth and his statement, joke, not a joke, whichever. The Dixie Chicks are now The Chicks. I saw that one coming. Dixie. You can’t say Dixie. Heck, that’s a street name of a place I have in California. I was there recently. I wondered if they were going to change the name. Who knows?
I kept hearing in my head all the country songs I know with Dixie in them. Or Southern Belle. Or rebel. Or heck, rebel yell. Are all of those things going to go away? Should they? Are they going to take down the signs in Hawkins that honored the life the woman of their town who became the face of Aunt Jemima, a local celebrity?
No. None of you are going to go to Quitman, or Mineola, or Hawkins, or Alba, or Golden or Lindale, and certainly not any of those little places in between, not Foukes, not my family’s place called Pleasant Ridge. And maybe even those places will become homogenized versions of themselves in today’s sanitizing of history. And maybe they have to. For the sake of what is good. But I hope not. Because like the cousin of Aunt Jemima’s Hawkins, Texas spokesmodel says in the video in the link below, if they do, a piece of my history is going to go with it.
I dedicate this song to East, Texas, to that Hawkins, Texas family of the Aunt Jemima spokesperson. The song doesn’t match; it’s just that it has such Southern pride as its theme, and it has lyrics that we’ll never hear in new songs. Plus I love me some Luke Bryan. We are all one big East, Texas family, no matter what color you are, all good people, and our history is ours. I hope we get to keep just a bit of it.
Your mama packed y’all up and moved you to the south
Backed a U-Haul ‘cross a one-tree yard to a tin-roof shotgun house
You didn’t know nobody, didn’t talk too much
Had a rocking little body with a yankee strut
A little shy side, a little wild side
With your long blonde hair all pulled up
Then you got in with some southern belles
Cut your jeans off with a rebel yell
Learned the talk of the Bible belt…
Oh and there is this. My grandmother, you know the one with the little house in Quitman? Well she too worked in “pancakes”. She walked for more than fifty years from that house in Quitman to a little café on the square across from the courthouse and served oil field workers breakfast and lunch for minimum wage and tips, and that money paid for the mortgage on that Quitman house I love so much. I bet my grandmother knew this woman from Hawkins. So there is that. Oh and people want to count that house of mine as an asset? No, it’s not an asset. It’s a tribute. It’s history.