‘But, Trajan,’ Petty Prue cried in real confusion. ‘You were so wonderful, helping me. Taking that cotton down to Mexico and coming back home.’ She looked at him in near-despair: ‘We thought you liked it here.’
Trajan moved to the door, determined not to be swayed by any argument these good people might advance. With tall dignity he told them: ‘You can say I was faithful, because I was. And you can say I come back when I could of run away, because I did. And you can say I was respectful, because I liked the way you handled this plantation with the men gone, Miss Prue. I tried to be a good slave, but don’t never say I liked it.’ And he was gone.
Not long after, Major Cobb and his new bride entered their carriage, old now and needing refurbishing, and rode in to Jefferson, where on the edge of town they found the small cottage for which their former slave Trajan had paid twenty-two dollars and fifty cents, including an acre of land. The spring flowers were fading, but the Cobbs could see where the summer beauties would soon be peeking out.
‘We’ve come to make you a proposition, Trajan.’
‘I been expectin’ you.’
‘How so?’ Petty Prue asked, accepting the chair her former maid Pansy offered. The others would stand, for there was only the one.
‘Because you need me. You goin’ to need me bad, to run your gin, your mills.’
‘You’re right,’ Cobb said. ‘We do need you.’
‘We miss you,’ Petty Prue said, ‘and we trust you.’
‘What I’d be willing to do,’ Cobb said enthusiastically, ‘is buy this house from you. Give you the land I spoke of, and you could—’
‘This is my house,’ Trajan said. ‘Pansy and I, we live here. You want us to work for you, we walk to work. But when work’s over, we come back here.’ He said this so forcefully that the Cobbs were stunned; they could not imagine that a black man would surrender such an obvious financial advantage in defense of a principle.
There was silence, broken by a practical suggestion from the major: ‘We’ll give you a mule so that you can ride to the mill.’
‘I would like that,’ Trajan said. Then he added a suggestion of his own: ‘To run the mill right, we ought to have Big Matthew back.’
Cobb noticed Trajan’s use of we, as if he were once more in charge of things, but the suggestion that Big Matthew be forgiven for his intemperate behavior was too much. ‘No,’ Cobb said gravely. ‘Matthew tried to strike me, and that I cannot forgive.’
‘Don’t you think he got a lot to forgive?’
Cobb studied this sensible question for some moments, then asked: ‘Will he work?’
‘He ain’t been workin’ and he ain’t been eatin’. Big Matthew, he ain’t dumb.’
When Cobb reluctantly agreed to hire the big man, Trajan brought forth a most unexpected request: ‘Major Cobb, Miss Prue, I knowed you would be comin’ and I knowed what you was goin’ to propose this mornin’. And I knowed I would accept, because I loves Lammermoor. But I had to jump the gun a little.’
‘You borrowed money?’
‘No!’ He broke into an easy laugh. ‘Smart man like me don’t throw money around. I still got all but what I paid for the land.’
‘What then?’
‘Union officers been houndin’ us. In a nice way, but they say all us former slaves got to take last names. They come to me yesterday, very forceful. This is the one they give me’—he hesitated—‘at my suggestion, if you ain’t mad?’
He presented the Cobbs with a card bearing his new name: TRAJAN COBB, and Petty Prue said: ‘We welcome you to freedom.’
… TASK FORCE
The Washington Insider almost wrecked our two-day May meeting in which we were to discuss the effect on Texas history of Southern immigration from states like Georgia and Alabama. Three days prior to our session the magazine revealed in a long think-piece the secret deliberations of a committee that had been assigned the task of selecting a new director of the Smithsonian Institution. The names of the four finalists were disclosed not in alphabetical order but according to their position in the betting, and the committee was astonished to find my name given last but with the notation ‘May be the dark horse. Apparent favorite of the board’s intellectuals.’
Before we could open our meeting in Dallas, a pulsating city whose vitality excited me, members of the press wanted to interview me, and when they were through, our own committee took over.
‘It’s a big job,’ I said, but immediately I corrected my phrasing: ‘Make that “It would be a big job … for whoever gets it.” ’
‘What are your chances?’ Rusk asked, cutting as usual to the crucial question.
‘You saw the story. Last in line but still fighting.’
‘Do you want it?’
‘Anyone like me would want it, Ransom. Best job of its kind in the nation. But my chances—’
He cut me off, asked for a phone, and within eight minutes had spoken to his Texas friends serving in Congress, telling them, not asking, to get on the ball and see that I got the appointment. He put in a special call to Jim Wright, the representative from Fort Worth, majority whip in the House, asking him for special help.
Much of our first day was wasted in aimless discussion about the possibility of my going to Washington, but the situation was placed in its proper perspective by the arrival in the late afternoon of a senior editor from the Insider, who asked to have cocktails with us and who divulged in the course of our chatting the actual situation: ‘I hate to say this, Barlow, but I have reason to believe that the selection committee threw your name in the hopper only to avoid the charge of parochialism. Most of the leading candidates were from the Northern and California establishments and they wanted the news stories to carry at least one Southern or Western name, and you covered both Texas and Colorado. To provide a respectable balance.’
‘Wait a minute!’ Rusk protested with that automatic defense of Texas which made men like him so abrasive. ‘You don’t use a Texan for window dressing. Damnit, we’ll soon be the most powerful state in the Union—’
‘But the University of Texas! A national committee would never—’
Now Quimper broke in to defend the school on whose board of regents he sat: ‘Our university takes a back seat to no one.’
‘In academic circles it does. That miserable show you people put on some years back, that regent Quimper going around firing everyone he didn’t like.’
‘That was my father,’ Quimper exploded, ‘and you’re right. Some people condemned him as a meddler. Those who knew him considered him a genius. At any rate, Texas now has two first-class public institutions.’
‘Which two?’ the visitor asked, and I was astonished by Quimper’s answer: ‘Texas and A&M.’ Often at our meetings he had joked about the latter school, denigrating it horribly, but now he was defending it; the difference was that when he joked, he was doing so to fellow Texans; when an outsider presumed to criticize, he became defensive.
‘They’re decent schools,’ the Washington man conceded. ‘Of the second category.’
‘What the hell are you sayin’,’ Quimper asked, his face growing red and his pronunciation more Texan. ‘The university has Stephen Weinberg, Nobel winner, and A&M has just signed up the great Norman Borlaug, also a Nobel winner for his work on grains.’
‘Yes,’ our visitor concluded, ‘but you hire them long after they’ve done their best work elsewhere. It’s doubtful you’ll ever produce a Nobel winner of your own.’
‘You Washington know-it-alls make me puke,’ Quimper said, retiring from the conversation. But the rest of us accepted the challenge, and in a series of short, impassioned statements we defended the intellectual honor of our state.
Miss Cobb was most effective: ‘You must remember, young man, that power is flowing into Texas at an astonishing rate. More congressmen with every census. More industry. More of whatever it is that makes America tick. You unfortunate people in the North will be spending the rest of your lives dancing to a Texas
tune. You should accustom yourselves to it.’
‘There are rules of quality which cannot be evaded,’ the editor, a graduate of Amherst and Yale, said. ‘Texas will have the raw power, yes, but never the intellectual leadership. You’ll always have to depend on the areas and the schools with higher standards.’
‘That’s the sheerest nonsense I’ve heard in a long time,’ Rusk grumbled. ‘In the fields that matter these days, Texas is already preeminent … and we’ll stay that way.’
‘What fields?’ the Washington man asked, and Rusk ticked them off: ‘Petroleum, aviation, silicon chips, population growth.’
‘When your oil wells dry up,’ the editor said, ‘you become another Arizona. Colorful, but of little relative significance.’
Rusk leaned back and looked at the young expert: ‘Son, of a hundred units of oil in the ground in 1900—take any well, any field you want—how much do you suppose we’ve been able to pump out so far? Go ahead, guess, if you’re the last word on petroleum.’
‘What? Seventy percent taken out, thirty percent still underground?’
‘We’ve taken out twenty percent. The limitations of present techniques prevent us from taking any more. So eighty percent of Texas oil, and that’s a monstrous reservoir, is still hiding down there, waiting for some genius to invent a better pump, a better system of bringing it up to where we need it. And you can be sure we’ll invent some way of doing just that.’
Now Quimper snapped back: ‘And the man who figures it out is gonna get his own Nobel Prize.’
Since the discussion had centered on me originally, I felt obligated to make a contribution: ‘I wanted the Smithsonian job. Anyone would. To shepherd the material record of the nation. But in a way, these two men are right. That’s a museum job. The past. The great struggles of the future are going to be fought out here in Texas. Even more than in California.’
The young man had excited our minds so thoroughly that Rusk suggested: ‘Some of the things you say make a lot of sense. Have dinner with us.’
During the meal the visitor made two points which kept the pot of agitation bubbling: Texas will accrue power, that’s obvious, but two deficiencies will hold you back. Because you produce no national newspaper like the New York Times or the Washington Post, you’ll not command serious intellectual attention. Newsweek losing its Texas editor, that hurts the opportunities of other Texans like Barlow enormously.’
Before either Rusk or Quimper could leap to defend the young man who had left Newsweek, the editor made a humorous evaluation which ignited the basic fires of patriotism: ‘And because your diet is so very heavy and unimaginative, you’ll lose ground to California, which eats so sensibly.’
This was too much for Quimper: ‘A good chicken-fried steak smothered in white gravy, or a big slab of barbecue with baked beans and potato salad, that’s man’s food. That keeps the blood circulatin’.’
‘And the cholesterol raging.’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ Quimper said, ‘if quiche and endive salad don’t destroy California, grantin’ it’s still there after the earthquake hits.’
As the night wore on, Professor Garza asked seriously: ‘So what are the chances that our boy will land the Smithsonian job?’ and our visitor said:
‘Nonexistent. They’ll have to have someone with more prestige, and from a more acceptable locale, but even listing Barlow was a vote of confidence. Twenty more years, if things progress as Miss Cobb suggests, someone from Texas will be acceptable.’
‘At that point,’ Rusk said firmly, ‘we’ll be sending our young people to see Washington and New York the way we send them now to see Antwerp and Milan. Interesting historical echoes but no longer in the mainstream.’
When we convened in the morning we found that our staff had provided us with a professor from Texas Christian University, who offered a genteel antidote to the heated argument of the night before: ‘I must warn you right at the start that I’m a Georgia woman who did her graduate work at South Carolina, so I’m imbued with things Southern, and the more deeply I dig into our past, the more respect I feel for Southern tradition. So please bear with me as I parade my prejudices.’
She delivered one of those papers that flowed along amiably, making subtle points whose veracity became self-evident as she marshaled her data; if the Insider man had dealt with the turbulent future, she led us seductively into a gallant past: ‘When I was a student, Southern professors made it a point to avoid what they called “that unfortunate phrase the Civil War.” They claimed it was never a civil war. They said that implied that in a state like Virginia, half the families sided with the North and took arms to defend that cause, while the other half favored the South and fought for it, with blood from two members of a given family mingling as it ran down some country lane in Virginia. They argued that that did not happen, not even in fractured states like Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri. “No,” they said with great emotion, “this was a war between states, Massachusetts versus Alabama. And when those Missourians who did favor the North fought their fellow Missourians who sided with the South, they did so at outside places like Vicksburg and Shiloh, never in Missouri itself” For them it was a war between sovereign states, and in our papers we had to refer to it as such. But now, for historians South and North, it’s the Civil War.’
Having instructed us on that important point, she proceeded to the heart of her statement: ‘While I find it impossible to describe Texas as a true Southern state, I do not ignore the profound influence that Southern mores have exerted. In 18 and 36, Texas had principally a Northern cast, as installed by people from Connecticut and Ohio who had laid over in Kentucky and Tennessee. But within the next twenty-five years, say to 18 and 61, the influence of the South became overwhelming.’
‘The vote on secession,’ interrupted Rusk, who was always surprising us with his command of relevant data, ‘was more than three-to-one—forty-six thousand to fourteen thousand—in favor of quitting the Union and fighting on the side of the South.’
‘Far more important was the cultural domination. The few Texas children who had schoolteachers tended to have Southern ones. Children able to go away to college often went to Southern ones. Books by Southern authors were purchased from Southern stores. Southern newspapers were read.’
Turning to Garza, she said: ‘You won’t like this, Professor, but recent studies are beginning to suggest that the Texas cowboy derived not primarily from Mexican prototypes, but from the habits of drovers coming in from the Southern states.’
She cited a score of challenging statistics and illustrations showing that the impact of the South on Texas custom was pervasive, but as so often happens in such discussion, three of her almost trivial observations aroused far more interest than those of a graver nature: ‘Food! Here the traditions of the South dominated. The Texan’s love of okra, for example. One of the world’s great vegetables, not native to Texas and unknown in states to the north, but a staple in the South. One could claim that the finest contribution we made to Texas life was the introduction of okra.
‘Corn bread the same. Iced tea, which is practically the national drink of Texas, especially with a touch of mint or lemon. And I’m particularly fond, as many Texans are, of dirty rice.’
‘What’s that?’ Garza asked, and the lecturer looked at him as if he were deprived: ‘You don’t know that gorgeous dish? Rice steamed in bouillon, with chicken giblets and chopped onions and pepper? Professor Garza, you ain’t lived!’
Her second point was more serious: ‘The most lasting influence may have been the language. The famed Texas drawl is nothing but the Deep South lingo moved west. You never say business. It’s bidniss. And I am very partial to the dropping of the s in words like isn’t and wasn’t: “Iddn’t today glorious and wuddn’t yesterday a bore?” ’
It was her third assertion which generated most comment: ‘I sometimes think that the major importation from the South was a sense of chivalry—a dreamlike attitude toward women. The
men coming west really had read their Walter Scott. They did see themselves as avatars of the heroic age. They lived on the qui vive, always ready for a duel if their honor was in any way impugned. They had exaggerated interpretations of loyalty, and were ready to lay down their lives in obedience to those beliefs. Passionately devoted to freedom, they sacrified all to preserve it. And like champions of old, they were not afraid to defend losing causes.
‘Texas today is Carolina of yesterday, and in no aspect of life is this more apparent than in your attitude toward women. You cherished us, honored us, protected us, but you also wanted us to stay to hell in our place. In no state of the Union does a woman enjoy a higher social status than in Texas. She is really revered. But in few states does she enjoy more limited freedoms. If I were, and God should be so generous, nineteen years old, with an eighteen-inch waist, flawless skin and flashing green eyes, I’d rather live in Texas than anywhere else, because I would be appreciated. But if I were the way I actually was at that age, thirty-one-inch waist, rather soggy complexion and an I.Q. hovering near a hundred and sixty, Texas would not be my chosen residence.’
Quimper took vigorous exception to this: ‘No state in the world pays greater deference to women than Texas.’
Our speaker proceeded: ‘Texas has its own peculiar set of laws, and they stem directly from the tenets of Southern chivalry. But this also has its drawbacks. Because Texans prize freedom so highly, they refuse to burden themselves with the obligations which other less wealthy states have assumed. In public education, very tardy in establishing schools, very niggardly in paying for them. In public services, except roads, among the least generous in the nation. In health services, care for children, care for the aged, provisions for prisoners, always near the bottom.’
This was too much for Rusk and Quimper, who battled to see who would refute her first; Rusk won: ‘But does not Texas stand, when all’s considered, as one of the best states in the Union?’ and she said: ‘Unquestionably.’
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