The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts

by Laura Tillman

  Helen was troubled by the poverty she saw around her and worried about the welfare of the Mexican peasants. She experienced the epidemics that seized the frontier populations, such as cholera, and watched as nearly every family mourned a loss when the outbreak haunted the land, bearing its indiscriminate scythe. Her compulsion to describe the nuances of her day-to-day to her family back home made her the best chronicler of life on this stretch of the border during that transformative time, at least that we know of today.

  Yet Helen’s ideas would not have been regarded as consequential during her own time, due to her gender, which guaranteed her a subordinate station to the men who surrounded her. Though her views may have been influential among elected officials, and with future-president Taylor, Helen would not be the one remembered for their impact. Once she departed from the frontier, her legacy evaporated. There is no Helen Chapman Hall in Brownsville, and though the home where she lived in Fort Brown was recently reassembled, it was not done in tribute to her life, but because it could house an office and blend in with the other historic architecture on a college campus. General Taylor and Helen’s devoted husband might have held her in high esteem, but definitions of noteworthy at that time did not include the wife.

  It took 150 years for Helen’s descendants to compile The News from Brownsville. Had her letters been lost, we would not know the history of the border as we do today. Helen’s letters are a reminder of all the other narratives we are missing from this period—those native to the region, and those who did not have access to Helen’s education. What remains is but a thimbleful of insight compared to what is lost.

  As any cook will tell you, time is a powerful ingredient, altering profoundly the substance that it acts upon. What might become of the building on East Tyler Street if it was left undisturbed for reexamination in a century or more? Like Helen’s writings, the building is not traditionally considered historic, or important, or educational today. But legacy cannot be realized without the passage of time, and the ability to synthesize the surrounding places and events into context. As I read Helen’s letters, I thought of what might become of the building many years in the future. Maybe it could serve as an example of the atrocities that can occur when the system fails those in need, or what did or did not qualify as “insanity” in the legal system of this time, or what can become of a place when compassion is projected onto it instead of fear and hatred. But such a legacy would require the transformation of the way we currently evaluate modern events and would require our culture to prioritize time, and therefore hindsight, over more immediate concerns. Maybe it’s not realistic to ask those of us living in the now to put a hypothetical future before our urgent necessities.

  What would Helen think of the Brownsville of today, a place that men of wealth in her time predicted would rival New Orleans? She observed the divide of the muddy river, the Rio Grande, which separated Mexico’s peasants from the northern wanderers who had been drawn here by a sense of possibility. Brownsville at that time was a potent, exciting land of opportunity, a flaming match that might be put to gasoline and combust, or simply burn out. The names of some of those businessmen—Stillman, Kenedy, King, McAllen—are still plastered around the Rio Grande Valley. Their descendants own land, businesses, and, to varying degrees, use that authority to drive public discourse and investment. Some of their names also populate the graveyard where Knopp and I walked together, though the remains of many wealthy citizens were eventually moved to the newer, more fashionable cemetery.

  As for Fort Brown, it was never empty for long. Local landowner Juan Cortina’s 1859 invasion of Brownsville caused troops to return to defend the city. During the Civil War, in 1863, Confederate soldiers set a fire in an attempt to prevent Union soldiers from seizing the fort. The fire quickly spread to Brownsville’s downtown. The fort remained a contested site, due to its strategic importance for cotton shipping. Nearby Palmito Ranch was the site of the final battle of the Civil War, on May 13, 1865, more than a month after General Robert E. Lee’s surrender.

  Soldiers worked steadily to rebuild the fort, constructing dozens of new buildings. Many of these, which went beyond pure utility and had real beauty, are now part of the local community college. The old hospital is a pristine example of border architecture. Hand-fired bricks create a pleasing mosaic of peach, red, and sand, and covered porches with graceful arches encircle the building, providing protection from the sun. Now the fort is a jewel of the city, but during its heyday, it was an isolated, dangerous place. Soldiers died frequently after catching diseases from water taken from the Rio Grande. Food was hard to get, and soldiers dined on rotten bacon or flour that had been raided by mice. Helen, who did not imbibe, was shocked by the raging alcoholism of the soldiers, and fatal duels between armed men in the streets. Today, the fort is a carefully restored and often-visited center of education and local pride. Then, it was a stage for death.

  Once the infrastructure of the fort was improved, its most peaceful era began. More illness, including a yellow fever epidemic, imperiled soldiers, but there were no battles.

  Shortly after the turn of the century, a railroad was built through the city, connecting it to Mexico. The population swelled in response, and the use of irrigation helped the region’s crops become more profitable.

  In 1906, the city became a flashpoint in the national press when news spread of what would become known as the Brownsville Affair, the details of which remain disputed today. A battalion of African-American soldiers had been stationed at the fort, and on a sweltering mid-August night, gunshots were heard throughout the downtown, killing a bartender and a horse, and wounding a town constable. The white commanders of the Twenty-Fifth Regiment said that all soldiers were accounted for and were asleep in their bunks. But the townspeople produced used bullet cartridges that matched the soldiers’ weaponry. All 167 infantrymen were dismissed by the army, despite the fact that none had been found guilty of wrongdoing.

  In his 1970 book, The Brownsville Raid, John D. Weaver advanced the theory that the soldiers could have been framed by racist townspeople. By 1972 Nixon granted a pardon to all the soldiers. The story remains ambiguous, debated by historians. The truth may never be known, except to the dead.

  In 1936, the Port of Brownsville opened, the second major business connection the city had established with the world. Two years later, Charro Days began, a festival celebrating the region’s culture and its ties to Mexico, intended to boost tourism and draw prospective residents.

  At the end of World War II, soldiers departed Fort Brown for the last time. Like so many of our national memories, which boastfully recollect victories in battle while lamenting the dead, Fort Brown’s legacy is a complex history of violence. When that violence is cloaked in love of country, the fort becomes an indispensable part of our collective past. While disease, alcoholism, and racism are mentioned in some accounts, they are mere footnotes. Instead, the fort is remembered for the glory of war, a symbol of Brownsville’s eternal significance in shaping the modern boundaries of our nation. Today, the site of the fort can contain, with seeming ease, the gruesome acts of combat and the peaceful, meditative practice of teaching and learning. What was once a hospital has been transformed into the stately office of a university president. What was once a morgue where the bodies of yellow fever victims were dissected became an accountant’s office.

  It’s hard for the building on East Tyler Street to compete. More than a decade after the tragedy, it felt more powerful, with its unpredictable bricks and slanted doorways, than the rise of earth where Fort Brown originated. But history is determined using the power of memory—a power measured in the resources and will of the living. We invest dollars and moments in one place over another. We identify the lessons that might be learned by a new generation, celebrate certain leaders and achievements, and damn others. And as we forget, we destroy. It is a silent violence. We cup our hands over the mouths of the dead, shutting our eyes and
choosing to forget them without a conscious thought.

  CHAPTER 7

  * * *

  A Corner in the Good Life

  No one is going to want to live in those memories.

  —FELIX SAUCEDA, NEIGHBOR

  I walked around the chain-link fences near the corner of East Tyler and Eighth Street and stood on the sidewalks in front of people’s yards. “Hello! Hola! Disculpa!” I’d call out, until someone emerged from a dark doorway, the lights dimmed inside the home to diminish the heat.

  Around the corner, an orange tree spilled fruit onto the sidewalk and a man lounged inside a car with the passenger’s door open in front of a little house with lattice fencing and a new coat of paint. The grass had been scraped away and a tidy dirt lot remained. From inside the front room of the house, the distinct excitement of a soccer announcer’s voice blasted Spanish syllables into the street from a TV set.

  “Hello? Hola! Disculpa!” I said from my post on the sidewalk.

  A middle-aged man with a graying mullet came outside. He was wearing black cotton boxers and nothing else. I told him I was writing about the building around the corner.

  “I used to live in that building,” the man, named Sixto, said in Spanish. “It’s uninhabitable.”

  “Did it bother you to live there, knowing what happened?”

  “No, that didn’t bother me. But I just couldn’t live there. I was on the second floor and there’s only one bathroom for all the apartments up there,” he said. “The apartments don’t have water, ­nothing.”

  Like Mr. Mendoza, one of the other neighbors, Sixto looked at the building pragmatically. No water, shared bathrooms—these concerns weighed far more heavily than the lives of strangers.

  He seemed anxious to get back to the soccer game, so I tried some more houses. At one, a woman curtly told me the owner wasn’t home and shut the door. At a yellow house that had been converted into a legal office, the young secretary said she was afraid to tell her boss, who was from Houston and didn’t know the city’s history, what had happened down the street. She didn’t like working on the same street as the building and suspected that ghosts were haunting the block.

  • • •

  At the University of Texas at Brownsville, Carlos Gómez, an art professor, painted a portrait of John during his first trial. The local news had been on in his studio, and Gómez glanced at the TV set as John’s eyes looked directly into the camera.

  “It blew me away,” Gómez said. In John’s eyes, Gómez saw rage, evil. The image hit him, he said, like a brick.

  He wanted to capture that evil in a painting. The result is a portrait in shades of fiery red and yellow, rendered with long brushstrokes. The piece, John Allen Rubio Asesino, was one in a series of five hundred paintings that Gómez called vignettes. He aimed to reach a thousand.

  Children, Gómez said, are sacred in South Texas, and John’s actions violated a fundamental belief that such things do not happen in a community so oriented around family. At the first opportunity, Gómez got rid of the painting, giving it to the permanent collection at Washington State University. Gómez thought the painting worked technically, but he didn’t want the negative energy around him. Still, he felt it should be seen.

  “We need to look at these things, because I think if we can recognize them, we can avoid them.” Some atrocities, he said, come out of the void, striking at random. But not this case.

  In 2010, after John’s direct appeal resulted in a new trial, his attorneys argued for a change of venue, saying that the community’s intimate knowledge and emotions about the case would preclude objectivity. In Barrio Buena Vida, it was hard to find anyone unfamiliar with what had happened, as it was whenever I mentioned the case to friends or acquaintances, or anyone I came across in Brownsville.

  At the change-of-venue hearing, John’s attorneys called witness after witness, trying to prove that all opinions here were biased. Father Ricardo Garcia, the pastor of Mary, Mother of the Church in Brownsville, had visited John in jail and described how easy it had been for him to see extensive information about John’s case, including a confession video that was posted online, through a simple Google search. Father Armand Mathew, a priest for sixty-one years in Brownsville, spoke of the hate the case had generated in the community, a reaction he found unacceptable.

  Q.Is there anything about the nearness or the proximity of the apartment where it happened and the people who are involved that aggravate that, in your opinion?

  A.Well, yes. I think the memory of the event is still very fresh in many people’s minds. How could it not be? And so I think that that is bound to have an effect. I—you know, in my opinion, I don’t think that anybody can be aware of this event and not have emotions that linger about it. And so I think even to this day—you know, I believe further, I don’t care who we are, myself included, we cannot have that kind of emotional experience and set it completely aside. I don’t care how sincere we might be, I just don’t think that we can have an experience like that and not have it affect us directly always.

  John’s attorney Nat Perez Jr. told me that, in arguing for a change of venue, he was trying to protect his client from a bloodthirsty public. “People were saying they need to take him to the nearest mesquite tree and string him up,” Perez recalled.

  In the end, John was granted a change of venue to Hidalgo County for his second trial, in a courthouse about an hour from Brownsville. By then, Armando Villalobos had been elected district attorney, and he felt strongly that a death sentence must be secured to achieve a sense of finality. During the second trial, Angela took the witness stand, telling the events from her perspective, but John did not. Again, John’s attorneys fought hard, and again he lost.

  • • •

  Across from the building, on East Tyler Street, I watched a man park and lumber out of his car. He limped toward his house, tilted his head, and drained the dregs of a Diet Coke.

  Felix Sauceda, seventy-three, had lived on this street his entire life. He told me in Spanish that he was sure that no one would live in the building, even if it was fixed up.

  “Do you believe in spirits, ghosts, things like that?” I asked.

  “They say they’re there. Personally, I haven’t seen them, but they say yes.”

  According to Felix, two factors conspired to cause John and Angela to commit the murders: drugs, which make you “do things you will regret your whole life,” and desperation.

  “Not because of madness?”

  “Yes, well, everything goes together. People, when they don’t have something, they go crazy. It’s like when you love a woman a lot and she leaves, you want to die alone or the opposite?”

  But what if the city wanted to change the building and make it better, what would he think of that?

  “They’re not going to get anyone [to live there] because no one’s going to want to remember what happened. That’s what I think.”

  Many of the people I’d spoken to wanted the building gone, but when presented with the possibility that the city could make something better of it, they agreed, skeptically, that might be a positive step. Not Felix.

  Felix told me about an incident at a clothing store downtown some years ago. The roof flooded and collapsed on the customers inside, and several people were crushed to death. These things happen, he said.

  “For a time it stays in your mind, but then you forget it like everything. But at the beginning it makes a big impact. They were children—children! We think more about children because they’re innocent, angels. We don’t think so much about them [the parents]. Because they’re the bad ones, we don’t think so much about them.”

  Is there a grain of something, un grano, that we could learn from all of this?

  Felix began to laugh.

  Something that perhaps we could use to improve things after such a tragedy?

  “No, no, no.”<
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  Why?

  “Because he who takes drugs takes them alone, and these are the things that happen! If we told stories of everyone who is in prison, it’s infinite. Nothing else like this has happened because things like this happen once in a lifetime, no more. Hopefully we’re not going to see something like this again, because it’s not pretty.”

  But a similar crime had occurred a few hours away in Laredo, just the week before I spoke with Felix. A man took his wife’s two children to a hotel, and when the police came knocking on the door, he shot the kids and then himself. Felix told me such things happen when people are desperate. I asked him why desperation would lead people to kill, rather than to look for help.

  “They looked, but they didn’t give it to them.”

  “I think there always are other options.”

  “I know there are!” Felix said. “But when a difficult time comes and nobody helps you, no one listens to you, they leave you alone . . . I don’t know how to explain it. . . . You go to your neighbor’s house and ask if they could lend you three dollars to eat and they say they don’t have it. You go to another [neighbor] and they don’t have it, no one has it. You’re frustrated and you have hungry children. And you kill them. That’s how people think.”

  You cannot know the power of desperation, Felix was saying, until you experience it in its raw form. Desperation can fuel acts that would otherwise be incomprehensible. And if you’ve never been filled with that kind of quaking, hysterical desperation, you simply cannot fathom the way it can make you behave.

  Felix told me about the woman who lived across the street. She shot herself with a rifle after being duped by a lover. Another neighbor who owned a store was killed with a machete.