by Sissy Spacek
The next morning, the bank managers set a long table behind the teller windows and piled it high with stacks of bills. As the townspeople came in to withdraw their money they could see that the bank had plenty of cash. The run was averted, and the bank was saved.
My grandfather was an unusual banker. When farmers couldn’t qualify for credit, AA would often loan them the money from his own funds. After his death, papers were found in his personal effects showing that he had forgiven the loans of those who couldn’t pay, saving farms all over the county from foreclosure. AA was elected mayor of Granger, served as postmaster, was active in the Granger fire department and the Odd Fellows. My grandfather became a big wheel in the Texas Democratic Party, as did his brother, Rudolph, who was elected to the state legislature. AA used to take my dad to all kinds of political events. I still have two tiny lead donkeys Daddy passed down to me—souvenirs from the 1928 Democratic national convention in Houston.
AA was a friend of the future president Lyndon Baines Johnson, who gave him the nickname “Double A.” Whenever Johnson was campaigning around Granger, he would spend the night at my grandparents’ home. LBJ would call and say, “Double A, I want to put my shoes under your bed.” He was a colorful houseguest. My grandmother surprised him one night while he was walking around the house wearing only boxer shorts—white with red polka dots. Johnson was a tireless campaigner who used to fly all over Texas in a helicopter while he was running for the Senate in the forties and fifties. Even towns like Granger and Quitman weren’t too small for Johnson. In Quitman he would land in the square, right downtown. The whole city would come out, mainly to gawk at the helicopter. Everywhere he flew, LBJ would throw his Stetson out the door of the helicopter, sailing it into the waiting crowd. Usually some small boy would end up with it, and during his stump speech, LBJ would ask, “Has anybody seen my hat?” The boy would run up to hand it to him, and Johnson would give him a silver dollar. I’m told my brother Robbie caught the hat one time, but I was too little to remember.
In 1921, my grandparents built a Craftsman-style bungalow in Granger. I loved that house, with its clean lines and breezy hallways; I still visit it in my dreams. There was a deep front porch covered by an arched portico, perfect for sipping Dr Peppers in the shade on hot afternoons. The front door opened into a spacious sitting room and a winding staircase with a wooden bannister rising up to the second floor. All through the house I could hear the clock ticking away from the stairwell. My brothers and I would slide down that bannister, or play school on the stairs with our cousins, blocking anyone trying to make it up to the second floor. The house was near the train tracks—everything in Granger was—and I would fall asleep in an upstairs bedroom, listening to the freight trains loaded with cotton rumble through town, blowing their horns.
The farm where I live in Virginia is near a set of tracks, and in the cool months when we open the windows and listen to the sound of the trains rolling by, it triggers those wonderful dreams of my grandparents’ house.
We called our grandfather “Pops” and our grandmother “Momsy.” She was a petite, hardworking, old-fashioned woman, who wore her hair pulled back and favored high-collared shirtwaist dresses. She was a homebody who rarely wanted to leave her house and garden. Pops adored her, and always called her schatzi—German for “darling.” When Pops was offered a position with the federal bank in Houston, Momsy couldn’t bear to leave Granger, so Pops turned down the job.
Pops was a fun-loving, stylish man who always dressed in a blue suit and a white shirt and tie, with a fresh rose in his lapel every day. Despite his old-world ways, he was always smiling and laughing. Pops was only sixty-six when he died—probably from meningitis contracted from a horsefly that bit him while he was inspecting one of his cattle farms. I was only three, but I have distinct memories of him. He used to carry me piggyback down from my bedroom; when I picture those stairs, it’s from up high, looking down past Pops’s ears and the back of his head, with my arms wrapped tightly around his neck.
Momsy lived alone in that house after Pops died, and the family would gather there every few months to visit. Whenever she had company, Momsy worked in her kitchen from sunup to sundown, making bread, biscuits, roasts, and chicken-fried steak, and turning out tray after heavenly tray of feather-light kolaches, sweet pastries filled with dollops of fruit or poppyseed paste.
Her only “vice,” as she saw it, was a fondness for television. My dad and his brother, Sam, bought her a television set when they first came on the market. She secretly loved it, but pretended not to watch and would switch off the set if she heard someone coming. Daddy would walk into the kitchen and say, “How do like that TV, Momsy?”
“Oh, Eddie. I don’t know, I don’t watch it much.”
But television sets took a long time to shut down in those days, and he would grin when he saw the telltale white dot glowing in the middle of the dark green screen.
AA and Mary Spacek raised four children: my dad, Edwin Arnold, born in 1910; his older sister, Thelma; and two younger siblings, Sam and Rose.
Thelma was the beauty of the family. As a young woman, she looked like Vivien Leigh. She was such a knockout that a Hollywood talent agent noticed her at an Interscholastic League competition. The scout, who was recruiting Texas beauties for the movies, offered to take Thelma to Los Angeles for a screen test. Pops didn’t trust the man and wouldn’t let her go with him. She always wondered what might have happened if she had gone to Hollywood—she might have become the first film star in the family. Instead, Thelma attended college, then met and married her husband, Elmore Ruel Torn, an agricultural economist.
By luck or fate, their handsome dark-haired son, Rip, took the trip to Hollywood that Thelma missed out on. Rip Torn turned out to be an incredibly talented actor. We were so excited to have a movie star in the family. He was particularly close to my dad, who loved him like a little brother and took him hunting and fishing when Rip’s father was away in the army. I was in awe when Rip brought his first wife, Ann Wedgeworth, to a family holiday in Granger. Ann, who looked like a red-haired Marilyn Monroe, was the most glamorous human being I had ever laid eyes on. Rip seemed so dashing as he tossed a football with my brothers out in the yard. Momsy loved to watch Rip in those classic Playhouse 90 productions. Years later Rip married the stage actress Geraldine Page. And it was with their help, more than a decade later, that I would get my first taste of the acting life during a starstruck summer in New York.
While his sister Thelma was starting her family, my dad, the firstborn son, went off to college at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. He was a history buff, but he loved the land and the soil even more, so he studied for a degree in agriculture. Pops paid his way for the first couple of years, but by then the Great Depression was setting in and times were hard all over Texas. Sam had just graduated from high school, and it was his turn to go to college. My dad was concerned that it might be a strain on his father to put two sons through college, so he came home one weekend and told his father not to send him any more money; he would work the rest of his way through school. He took a job mucking stalls in a horse barn in the mornings before class. Then, after he finished studying at night, he’d put on a tuxedo and play in a dance band. He was an ace on the four-string banjo and the baritone guitar, and that’s how he earned his way through college. After my dad graduated, he toured with his band for a while and I think he seriously considered becoming a professional musician. But his more practical nature trumped his artistic side, and he decided to pursue his career in agriculture.
There must be an artistic gene in the Spacek family because Thelma was a talented painter, and so was their baby sister, Rose, who also acted in local theater productions. Rose loved hats and was always wonderfully dramatic. When I started acting, I would often send her hats that I’d worn in films. I used to get calls from her whenever my movies ran on television. “Sissy!” Rose would trill. “Guess what? I just saw my hat on TV!” She rarely mentioned that the hat she sa
w had been on my head.
Daddy’s younger brother, Sam, graduated from Texas Tech and became a cotton farmer in Ralls, Texas, near Lubbock. He married Maurine Alexander, a beautiful porcelain-skinned redhead who must have kept busy looking for shade on the treeless plains. Sam had a grain elevator business for a while and made a good living. I remember him as a charming man and a real character. He would never let go of a car once he owned it, always thinking he was being cheated out of the trade-in price, so he kept their chassis around his property, like monuments to his good sense. He was also an amateur photographer and something of a storm chaser, for which there was plenty of opportunity on the plains of West Texas. He was known to hustle the family into the storm cellar when a tornado was approaching, then tie himself to the door and take pictures. The one time he didn’t have his camera with him he was driving around in his old pickup when a twister took him by surprise. The way he told the story, the tornado lifted up the truck, tore off the driver’s side door, then set the rig back down in a pasture with the engine still running. Sam didn’t have a scratch on him, and he proceeded on his way.
Sam and Maurine liked to travel, and they used to load the family into their Airstream trailer and visit us back in East Texas. We loved to play with our cousins, Jan Kathryn and Sam Pat, who were about our ages. Eventually they all moved to Quitman to be near the rest of us, drawn by the powerful bonds of family that have held the Spaceks together for generations.
After visiting my grandparents in Granger, we’d pack up the car again and head south. It might be chilly, even snowing, in East Texas when we left home. But the air grew warmer and the land greener with every mile of the journey, and by the time we reached the Rio Grande Valley, it was like being in the tropics. We could throw off our jackets and run barefoot in the winter sun (if, of course, Daddy said it was okay). It was exciting and exotic to spend Christmas on the Mexican border with our maternal grandparents, Thomas Holliday and Elizabeth Holliday Spilman, who we called Papa and Big Mama.
Thomas Holliday Spilman, known to his friends as T. Holl, descended from a family of wealthy merchants in Ottumwa, Iowa, but his heart was in the South. His father, Thomas Percival Spilman, had been a major in the Union Army during the Civil War and was stationed in Mississippi. At the end of the fighting he bought a large plantation near the city of Canton, where he befriended Isaac Newton Holliday, a Confederate veteran. A year or so later, Major Spilman leased out the plantation and returned to his family in Iowa. His first child, my grandfather, was born in 1867 and given the middle name Holliday in honor of his Mississippi friend.
T. Holl was raised in Ottumwa and grew prosperous running his father’s hardware store and tinning business. He married a local girl named Nettie, with whom he had four children, but Nettie’s health was precarious. So he moved the family down to his father’s Mississippi plantation to take advantage of the warmer weather. Sadly, Nettie didn’t survive, and he was left a widower with young children to raise.
Two years later, he saw my grandmother, Elizabeth Holliday, sitting across the aisle from him at a Methodist prayer meeting in Canton. “She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen,” he said. She was also the granddaughter of his father’s Confederate friend, Isaac Newton Holliday, T-Holl’s namesake. Elizabeth was fifteen years younger than her new admirer. She had just returned home after being away for a few years teaching school and then attending business college in Jackson. She wore her long, strawberry blond hair rolled up in a bun, just like I do now. (I am her namesake; I inherited her coloring, and was always told I favored her. I treasured this comparison because my grandmother was so loving and kind.) T. Holl fell for Elizabeth instantly. She was taken with him, too, describing him as “the cutest gray-haired man.” She also liked to say he was the second Yankee she had met in her life—“and the first one was crazy.”
In a way, Elizabeth and T. Holl’s marriage was born out of the deep and unusual friendship of two men—his father and her grandfather—who had fought on different sides in a terrible war. The spirit of civility and grace followed them all their lives. Their first child, born in 1907, was named after Elizabeth’s father, Joseph. They nicknamed him Bud.
But all was not civil in Mississippi. According to family legend, T. Holl was despised as a Yankee carpetbagger by a lot of the white folks around Canton, and he had to carry a pistol in his belt for protection. He eventually persuaded his young wife to move back to Ottumwa with him. Once again, he prospered in the hardware and tin business, and Elizabeth bore him a daughter named Elizabeth, whom they called Sis, or Spilly. But after four years of cold northern winters, T. Holl’s health began to suffer, and his doctor advised him to move to a warmer climate. He chose the rustic lower valley of the Rio Grande, where, in 1912, he bought his first section of land seven miles outside of the small town of Mission, near McAllen. When the family arrived, Mission was little more than a railroad stop surrounded by mesquite and huisache brush.
In those days Pancho Villa was roaming the Mexican border, terrorizing Texas settlers. Although Villa never quite reached Mission, he came close enough. Once Papa was showing some property in his Model T, and a bullet went right through his hat, missing his head by a hair. It was a wild time in the valley. Gangs of thieves would break into homes while the owners were off at church. The outlaws would pile the valuables on the bed and make bundles out of the blankets and sheets to carry off the loot.
It was a hardship for Elizabeth, living on the remote, primitive ranch while she was pregnant with their third child. Papa installed, at great expense, a telephone line from town, so that she could call the doctor when her time came to deliver. But when she went into labor, the doctor couldn’t be found anyway. She gave birth to my uncle Newton right on the ranch, with help from her visiting brother-in-law, who happened to be a physician.
As soon as the infant was old enough to travel, she took baby Newton and the older children on the train back home to Mississippi. From there she sent her husband a letter, refusing to return until she had a place to live in town. T-Holl found a house in Mission the next day. After his family returned, Papa moved on from ranching to land trading.
My mother, Virginia, was born in 1917, followed six years later by Wade, the baby of the family. My mom was a beautiful young girl with thick, dark hair, dimples, and a set of slightly crooked front teeth that protruded a bit beneath her upper lip. She begged not to have to wear braces because she had heard that they could rot all her teeth and make them fall out (a realistic fear back in those days). And so all her life Mother had a tiny flaw in her smile that became part of her charm. She was a good student and loved music, but for some reason she hated piano lessons so much that she would hide behind the piano when the teacher arrived. She idolized her siblings and her parents, particularly her father. She told us that when she was a little girl she got God, Santa Claus, and her daddy all mixed up.
The Spilmans were a gracious, happy family even though their lives were complicated and sometimes tragic. When Mother was a toddler, both of her grandfathers decided to ride the train down to Mission to visit the family. As soon as they arrived, T. Holl offered to take everybody out for a spin in the Model T. The story goes that T. Holl was standing in front of the Ford, cranking the engine, when it suddenly caught, and the car lurched forward. Joseph Holliday tried to stop the car and was crushed under its wheels. He died from his injuries a few weeks later. My grandfather broke his leg in the accident and walked with a cane for the rest of his life.
From the stories our mother told us about growing up in that large family, it’s a wonder any of them survived to adulthood. One afternoon Big Mama invited a group of women over for a special tea. Her four young children were instructed to go outside and play, and under no circumstances were they to interrupt while she had company. The kids started playing out in the field where they kept a little mule, and somehow young Newt got on the wrong side of him and was knocked out cold. The other children debated for a while what to do; the
y had been told not to go into the house under any circumstance. Finally they got up their courage and knocked on the door. “We’re sorry to disturb you, Mama, but Newt’s been knocked unconscious for a long time,” they told Big Mama, who screamed and came running. Somehow Newt survived and lived to a ripe old age.
Wade, the youngest, also had more than his share of close calls. When Mother was about eight years old, she was left to babysit Wade, who was still a toddler. She was trying to get him to sleep, but he kept fussing and fussing, getting out of his crib and asking for a glass of water. Finally she told him, “All right, Wade. I’ll get you a glass of water, but if I do you’ll have to drink every drop of it and then go to bed.” On her way to the kitchen, she saw a glass of water on the mantel, grabbed it, and made him drink it down. But the glass on the mantel wasn’t filled with water like she thought, it was filled with clear coal oil. She shuddered telling us how sick it made that baby, and how he nearly died from the poison. But Wade bounced back and grew up tall and athletic, and never seemed to hold the coal-oil incident against her.
After they moved to Texas, the Spilmans never had much money, but they loved one another, and by all accounts had a wonderful life. T. Holl adored his wife; always gave her a kiss when he left the house and when he returned. They were never known to argue, even about politics, although their views were diametrically opposed. She was a yellow dog Democrat, and he was a Republican. Every Election Day, my grandfather would link his arm in hers and say, “Come, Elizabeth. Let’s go to the polls and cancel each other’s votes.” And that’s just what they did. Even after they lost almost everything, they lived out their lives in threadbare gentility.