No more was said about the counties, either in class or out, until one blustery day at the end of February, when Miss Barlow said quietly: ‘Beth, in your list of counties, if I remember, you had King County. Could you locate it now if I hand you the ruler?’ And it was remarkable, but almost every child in that class could now go to the big outline map and point unerringly to his or her five counties; Miss Barlow’s exercise had imprinted these locations forever, and as she predicted, her students were now beginning to relate the other two hundred and forty-nine counties to those already learned.
Without hesitation Beth pointed to four-square King, almost identical in shape to another twenty clustered about it. ‘Now, Beth, do you remember whom that county was named after?’
‘William P. King of the Immortal Thirty-two from Gonzales.’
‘And do you know who the Immortal Thirty-two were?’
Frantically Beth scoured her mind, and only the vaguest data came forth, so that finally she was forced to confess: ‘I don’t know, Miss Barlow, but somehow I think they had to do with the Alamo.’
‘You are right, and you may sit down.’
Then, in a low voice which none of the children who heard it that day would ever forget, Miss Barlow began a quiet recitation of the facts surrounding one of the overwhelming incidents of Texas history, and as she spoke, time shifted backward and her listeners were in the small town of Gonzales, east of San Antonio:
‘It was on this very day, one hundred and thirty-three years ago, that a messenger galloped into Gonzales with the dreadful news that the Alamo was surrounded by General Santa Anna’s troops and that the brave defenders inside were doomed to death, all of them, unless they received help. “They must have reinforcements” was all the messenger said. As he uttered these words the men of Gonzales knew that even if they did march to the rescue, the Alamo was doomed. There was no way that so few Texans, however brave, could hold off so many Mexicans, however cowardly. Whoever entered the Alamo was certain to die.
‘So what did they do? Thirty-two of the bravest men Texas would ever produce shouldered their muskets, kissed their women goodbye, and marched resolutely into the sunset. And I want you to remember this, young people. The men of Gonzales didn’t just go up to the gates of the Alamo and cry “Let us in!” No, they had to fight their way in, cutting a path through the Mexican army. At any point they’d have been justified in turning back, but none did. They fought to enter, and in doing so, found death and immortality.
‘As sure as the sun rises, every one of you in this classroom, boys and girls alike, will some day find yourself in the town of Gonzales, listening to your messenger cry “Help us or we perish!” It may happen to you in El Paso or Lubbock or Galveston.’ (Miss Barlow was incapable of visualizing her graduates as living outside Texas.) ‘And each of you will be called upon to make a decision of the most vital importance: right or wrong … life or death. And the manner in which you respond will determine whether you will be known as immortal or craven.
‘If I tell you about the glories of Texas history with pride and deep feelings it’s because one of the thirty-two Immortals was my great-grandfather Moses Barlow, and the woman he kissed goodbye as he marched off to the Alamo was my grandmother Rachel, who was four years old at the time but who remembered that day until she died in 1930 in Milam County at the age of ninety-eight. So I heard of Gonzales personally from a woman who was there that day, and when you are an old person in San Antonio or Fort Worth, you can tell your grandchildren in the year 2036 that you yourself heard me speak of a woman who was present when the heroes of Gonzales marched voluntarily to death and immortality.’
On no student did the impact of that lesson fall more heavily than on Beth Morrison. For two days she went directly to her room after supper, preferring to speak to no one and refusing even to answer her telephone when it rang. On the third day she asked wanly: ‘What parts of Texas did we like best when we saw those slides?’ and she joined her family in analyzing the virtues of the forested northeast, the blazing sands of the Rio Grande and the mountains of the west. Her brother said he liked best the sign in the park which said BEWARE RATTLESNAKES. She ignored this, and on the fourth morning she appeared at breakfast with a single sheet of paper, which she hesitantly showed her mother, who cried: ‘Beth, this is really good. This is much better than I could have done.’ When her father asked to see it, Beth grabbed it nervously and said: ‘Later.’
She went to school early, slipped into her classroom and deposited on Miss Barlow’s desk a brown envelope that showed no indication of its source, and when class began Miss Barlow coughed and said: ‘Today we have a most wonderful surprise. One of our members has written a beautiful poem, which I want to share with you. It’s called “A Song of Texas.”
‘Bluebonnets, paintbrush on trails through the pine,
Sweep of the meadow that climbs to the hill,
My hungry heart makes this loveliness mine.
Sleep or awake I shall cherish you still—
O Texas, your beauty enchants me forever.
Cactus and mesquite, the bold Rio Grande
Cuts a deep swath through your perilous waste,
Marks me a path through the treacherous sand,
Leads me to wonders that I have embraced—
O Texas, your harshness invites me forever.
Blue mountains, brush on wild plains of the west,
Challenging eagles to soar to new heights,
Offering refuge to only the best,
You dazzle us all with your wondrous delights—
O Texas, your greatness rewards me forever.’
The room was very quiet as Miss Barlow folded the paper and returned it to its brown envelope: ‘I think we can guess who wrote this lovely poem, can’t we?’ and with no exception, all in the class turned to look at Beth, for only she ever used such words or framed them into such images.
That evening Miss Barlow telephoned the Morrisons to reassure them: ‘I think your little Beth is coming around. She’s developing a proper attitude toward things that matter.’ And next morning at breakfast Beth startled her parents, almost to the point of making them choke on their coffee, by saying with great fervor: ‘Gosh, wouldn’t it be awful to marry a man who wasn’t from Texas?’
In the Rio Grande Valley things were not going well for Héctor Garza. Seventy-eight years old and far less agile than he had been in the days when he helped Horace Vigil run the Valley, he had been forced to watch his Mexican community fall into sad disarray, for the dictatorship had been taken over by Horace’s nephew, an austere, grasping man named Norman Vigil, who considered the area to be his fiefdom but did not accord peasants like Hector the courtesies due them.
‘He derives his power from us,’ Héctor complained to younger men, ‘but he shows us no thanks. Worst of all, he shows us no respect.’
Hector could have made his protest much stronger, for Norman Vigil, displaying none of that classic grandeur of the typical Mexican patron who robbed and ruled with style, was a mean-spirited man who grabbed everything and shared nothing. ‘He sends his beer trucks over three counties but never gives the Little League a dime.’ He also never gave hospitals or schools a dime, either, and Hector sometimes thought that the slim strand of inheritance that had once kept Horace Vigil so strong a member of the Hispanic community had vanished in the case of Norman.
‘He’s not Mexican at all,’ Héctor said. ‘He’s pure gringo, and in this Valley that’s a bad thing to be.’
To explain how Vigil managed to keep his power was rather difficult, for the anglos with whom he associated exclusively represented only twelve percent of the population, while the Hispanics made up eighty-eight. Yet Vigil saw to it that the anglos controlled the school board, the police department, all the banks and most of the retail establishments. He did this by dominating the politics and determining who should run for what office; obviously, he could not himself cast all the ballots for his candidates, but because of his eco
nomic power he could terrorize the local Mexicans, forcing them to vote for his men, and he did still control that vital Precinct 37, and from it, late on election night, he extracted whatever number of votes he required to keep his preferred Democrat in power. He was also protected by state officials, who appreciated his votes, and in the wild Senate primary of 1948, when the upstart Democrat Lyndon Johnson defeated the established Democrat, ex-Governor Coke Stevenson, by eighty-seven votes out of nearly a million cast, Norman Vigil had provided from Precinct 37 a vote of Stevenson 13, Johnson 344, and such a reliable man was not going to be treated roughly by state investigators so long as the Democratic party stayed in power.
But the principal reason why Vigil continued his dictatorship was one which would have applied in no other state, even though its police could be as rough as those in Texas: for several decades the captain of the Texas Rangers along the border had been Oscar Macnab, now sixty-nine years old and retired from active duty, but still a dominant figure in Saldana County politics and one of Norman Vigil’s chief supporters.
Macnab had made his reputation as a young Ranger in the oil fields of Larkin County when he tamed its boom-town frenzy almost single-handedly. Cool in temperament, determined when he got started, and severely just according to his own definitions, he had transferred about 1940 to the Rio Grande, where, during the years of World War II, he ran the territory pretty much as he wished. Since he had acquired the Ranger’s traditional distrust of Indians, blacks and what he called ‘Meskins,’ and the traditional respect for anyone who had acquired an unusual amount of money, he had found it easy to fit into Rio Grande life; white American men of importance, like Norman Vigil, were to be protected; brown Hispanics, like Hector Garza, were to be kept in their place; and outright Mexicans, like those who swam across the river to vote for Norman Vigil in elections, were to be eliminated if they stepped out of line.
In his nearly thirty years of control in Saldana County, Macnab had served as the right arm of Norman Vigil, arresting those Vigil wanted arrested, frightening those Vigil wanted to chase out of his county. At election time he policed the polls, keeping away troublemakers and suspected liberals. After the votes were counted, he saw to it that any complaints were muffled, and if the protester pursued his objections, Macnab helped muscle him out of the area.
The captain never thought of himself as the colleague and protector of the local dictator, but that’s what he was. Nor would he admit that he was prejudiced against Mexicans or Hispanics: ‘I don’t like Meskins. Don’t trust them. And I expect to give them an order only once. But I am certainly not prejudiced against them. I have solved many murders involving only Meskins and will do so again if called upon. But you cannot force me to like them.’
He had had in his company from time to time Rangers who had blazed away at Mexicans with almost no provocation, and there were, he would admit privately, ‘a few scoundrels on my team that could have been tried for murder, but this is a frontier area and I must insist that by and large, justice was done. I saw to that.’
Justice for Macnab consisted of identifying the interests of those in command, Norman Vigil, for example, or the big landowners, and then seeing that those interests were protected and if necessary furthered; in an orderly society that was the only thing to do. For example, when field workers on the big citrus plantations, now the principal source of wealth in the Valley, sought to form a labor union, an un-Texas thing to do, Captain Macnab found every excuse for hampering their efforts, including arresting them, threatening them, and keeping them from holding public meetings. He never opposed them as union agitators, which they were, but only as people threatening the peace of an otherwise quiet and pleasant valley: ‘If their hearts are set on a union, let them move to New Jersey, where anything goes.’ He was equally stern when teachers agitated for higher wages in the Saldana school system: ‘To strike or even talk about striking is un-American and will not be tolerated in my district.’
It was still customary, in the Spanish-speaking communities, to refer to Rangers as Rinches, and Captain Macnab was the premier Rinche of his district. It was he who enforced the laws on the Hispanics, who kept their children in line the way the anglos preferred, and who dictated the terms of general behavior. If a Hispanic behaved himself and made no move to strike the citrus growers for higher wages, he encountered no trouble from Captain Macnab.
During his first twenty years of duty along the Rio Grande he arrested two white men. One had holed himself up in a shack with his estranged wife, threatening to kill her if anyone moved toward the place. Macnab never hesitated. Gun at the ready, he walked in and saved the distraught woman, who then refused to bring charges against her man. The other was a persistent drunk who tried to deliver the Sunday sermon at the Baptist church; he was easily removed.
But he found it necessary to arrest hundreds of Mexicans who seemed not to fit into Texas life. They either stole things, or beat their wives, or refused to send their children to school, or ran off with cars belonging to white men. If one had talked with Macnab during these years, he would never have heard of the countless law-abiding Hispanics. Like the Swedes of Minnesota or the Czechs of Iowa, the Hispanics of Texas were good and bad. Macnab dealt only with the bad, and in this group he placed anyone of Mexican heritage who endeavored, by even the slightest move, to alter any aspect of Valley life from the way he believed it had always been, and should remain. He was therefore alerted when Norman Vigil, who now lived in a spacious house far removed from the beer-distribution office, summoned him to an unscheduled meeting.
‘Captain, I can see trouble, real trouble, coming at us down the road.’
‘Like what?’
‘This Héctor Garza, used to work for my uncle, reliable sort normally, he wants to run a damned Meskin for mayor.’
‘You already have a mayor, don’t you?’
‘Good man. Selected him myself. Used to work on one of the big citrus plantations.’
‘Then why should Héctor …?’
‘He says it’s time the Meskins had their own mayor.’
‘Hell, how old is he?’
‘You won’t believe it, but he must be past seventy-five.’
‘Why don’t he roll over and quit makin’ trouble?’
‘How old are you, Captain?’
‘I’m sixty-nine, but I’m not tryin’ to run the Ranger office. Tell him to knock it off.’
‘He won’t do it. I think he sees this as his last battle.’
‘It will be his last if he tries to mess up this county. Things are in good shape here. Let’s keep them as they are.’
‘I don’t think he sees it that way. One of my men heard him speak to a group. He told them: “The time has come to exert our numbers,” or some damned nonsense like that.’
‘He certainly doesn’t want the office himself, does he? At his age?’
‘No! He’s been coaching his grandson.’
‘Simón? The one who went to college up in Kansas?’
‘Yep. You give one of those Meskins a book, he thinks he’s Charlemagne.’
‘We should of slowed Simón down years ago.’
‘Once they go to college, they should never be allowed back.’
And that was how the Bravo Incident, which commanded the national press for several months, began. Héctor Garza, in the waning years of his life, thought that if his Hispanics constituted over eighty-five percent of the Valley population, they should have some say in how the Valley was run, but once he publicly voiced this belief, he put himself athwart the political power of Norman Vigil and the police power of Oscar Macnab.
The confrontation started on a low key, with Macnab utilizing every political trick to keep the Hispanics off balance. Wearing his fawn-gray whipcord suit, his big hat and his boots, he appeared suddenly wherever they were proposing to hold a rally, and quietly but forcefully informed them that this was illegal without permission from the local judge. He would also dominate hearings convened by the judge a
nd guide the decisions handed down. He was tough in breaking up political meetings, citing possible subversion or endangerment to the community, and whenever the two Garzas devised some way to neutralize his quiet tyranny, he would come up with a new trick to harass them.
He refrained from ever touching either the elder Garza or his grandson, but he did have them arrested twice, for blocking the highway, and he did see to it that they spent three nights in jail. But with the lesser Hispanics he could be extremely rough, knocking them about and threatening them with greater harm if they persisted in their attempt to elect a Mexican mayor in opposition to the perfectly good man who had been running the town, with Norman Vigil’s help, for the past dozen years.
One morning, in frustration, Macnab marched in to the Hispanic political headquarters and demanded to see Héctor Garza: ‘What in hell are you Meskins tryin’ to do?’
‘We’re trying to govern this town, as our numbers entitle us to do.’
‘Your numbers, as you call them, have no right to trespass on the rights of those good folks who have given us good government for all the years of this century.’
‘That’s not good enough any more, Captain.’
‘It’ll be good enough if I say so. You stop this nonsense, Héctor, and get back to your patio. These are things that don’t concern you.’
‘They concern us very much. Mr. Vigil can’t run this town any longer the way he wants to.’
The meeting ended in an impasse, with Ranger Macnab, a little heavier now, handing out the orders as in decades past, and Héctor Garza, a little thinner, resisting them. As Macnab left the headquarters, frustrated by this sudden emergence of a power he could not suppress, he warned: ‘Héctor, if you go ahead with this, you’re goin’ to get hurt, bad hurt.’ To him, Bravo and its resurgent Mexicans were exactly like Larkin and its rioting roughnecks: you subdued each by the application of steady force, and he was prepared to import all the force required to put down this insurgency.
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