SHE TRIED TO MAINTAIN her standards. Her favorite quotation, she said, was one from Browning: “The common problem, yours and mine, everyone’s/Is not to fancy what were fair in life/Provided it could be—but finding first/What may be and how to make it fair up to our means.” She refused to use the customary oilcloth on her table; she used tablecloths, no matter how much work it was to wash and iron them. “She made a ritual out of little things, like serving tea in very thin cups,” one of her daughters says. Never—even in her old age—was she able to reconcile herself to the fact that three of her five (they came at two-year intervals) children were delivered by a midwife: when labor pains began for her first child, Lyndon, her husband sent for a doctor, but the nearest one was twenty miles away, and the creeks were on the rise; as morning approached, and the pains came closer together, it became obvious that he wouldn’t arrive in time. Sam Johnson, Sr., sixty-nine years old, saddled his most reliable horse, Old Reb, rode along the Pedernales until, half a mile above the usual ford, he found a low spot, and then spurred the horse into the raging water to bring back a German midwife, Mrs. Christian Lindig, and it was she who presided at the delivery; when, in 1951, Lyndon asked his mother to jot down some family reminiscences, she did not mention Mrs. Lindig as among those “present at his birth,” but credited as “the attending physician, Dr. John Blanton of Buda”—who actually didn’t arrive until quite a few hours later. (Says Sam’s sister Jessie: “Rebekah was always, always dignified, you know, in everything. … I don’t think Rebekah would have ever wanted anybody to say that Lyndon came with a midwife instead of a real doctor. I don’t think she would have ever said.”)
(There was one other character-revealing note in the episode. As old Sam—the gallant, unselfish Johnson—saddled his horse, his wife, Eliza, who was a Bunton and believed that “Charity begins at home,” tried to stop him from going, shouting, “You will be drowned!” as he rode off.)
IN 1913, after Lyndon and two girls had been born, Sam and Rebekah moved into Johnson City, into a snug, three-bedroom white frame house with lacy Victorian “gingerbread” scrollwork on the gables and with trellises on which she soon had wisteria growing. But gingerbread and wisteria couldn’t make Johnson City into Blanco or Fredericksburg. Stella Gliddon, who moved there from Fredericksburg about the same time as Rebekah, says: “When I came to Johnson City, I thought I had come to the end of the earth.”
She couldn’t believe the primitiveness of the living conditions she found there, Mrs. Gliddon says. Registering at the only hotel in town—already appalled at its rickety shabbiness—she asked where the bathroom was, and was told there wasn’t any, not even a sink to wash in. Nor, she was told, did most homes in Johnson City have indoor plumbing: “I don’t think there were three bathrooms in the whole town,” she recalls, meaning, by bathrooms, rooms with sinks and bathtubs; no one in Johnson City had a toilet in the house. When she asked where she could eat, she was told that there was one café in town, but that it was only open when the proprietors, King and Fannie Casparis, felt like opening it, and that they hadn’t felt like it for some time. (Another visitor recalls going to Casparis’ Café at noon one day and finding on its door a sign he considered somewhat unusual for a restaurant: CLOSED FOR LUNCH.) Since there was, therefore, no place in Johnson City where a meal could be purchased, Mrs. Gliddon decided to make herself a sandwich, but when she went shopping, she learned, to her astonishment, that no local store stocked bread because there wasn’t enough demand for it; “you couldn’t buy a loaf of bread in Johnson City.”
Fredericksburg was a town with only 4,000 residents, but its homes were solid German rock houses with arbors and orchards (and indoor plumbing); it had handsome churches and a large, sprawling hotel and a long Main Street lined with bustling shops. Johnson City looked like the set for a Grade-B Western. Its single commercial street, Main Street (unpaved, of course), was a row of a few one-story stores, each with a wooden “awning,” supported by poles, extending over the rickety wooden sidewalk that ran in front of them. It was almost wholly a one-story town: the only larger structures were a rickety water tower; a corrugated-tin cotton gin; the bank; Doc Barnwell’s “Sanitarium,” which had four or five beds upstairs over his office; and two square two-story stone buildings: the school and the courthouse. Scattered around that Main Street were a few homes—very few. About 1916, two of the Redford boys, Cecil and Emmette, climbed into the school belfry, from whose platform they could see about five miles in every direction; counting children and hired hands—“because,” Cecil says, “we knew every person in every house anywhere around”—the total population of the area, as far as the eye could see, was 323.
The sense of isolation—of being cut off from the rest of the world—was overwhelming, Mrs. Gliddon remembers. From the top of Lookout Mountain, about four miles away, it was possible to see farther than from the school belfry, and from its crest, the hills, ridge after ridge, rolled endlessly away in an awesome, empty landscape. And then one looked down and saw Johnson City—a tiny cluster of houses huddled together in the midst of immense space.
Cars and roads would one day bridge that space, but when Sam and Rebekah moved to Johnson City, there were almost no cars—three or four in the town—and no paved roads for cars to travel on. Even by car, it took long hours to reach Fredericksburg or Austin—when the roads and creeks were passable. Often they weren’t, and then someone who wanted to go to Fredericksburg or Austin had to be “brought out” of Johnson City as if out of darkest Africa. “Once I wanted to go home to Fredericksburg for Christmas,” Mrs. Gliddon recalls. “I had to have a man with a hack and horse take me out to Stonewall, and a car was able to come out from Fredericksburg to there and take me the rest of the way.” Johnson City was, she says, “an island town,” a town surrounded by—and cut off by—an ocean of land.
Rebekah saw it the same way. And its people, while friendly—“the people [in Johnson City] were the friendliest, warmest people I met anywhere,” Mrs. Gliddon says—were not people who could provide Rebekah with the things so important to her. “She was probably the best-educated woman in the whole county,” her son Sam Houston has written, and she probably was; she was the only woman with a college degree in Johnson City; no more than two or three residents of the town—of either gender—had spent any time at all in college; Johnson City was, in fact, a town with hardly any books except for the textbooks used in school. One farmer, Robert Lee Green, was so desperate for something to read that when there was some evening event at school, he would sneak out of the auditorium and down to the high-school classroom and sit there reading a history textbook until it was time to go home. Worst of all for Rebekah, the schools were terribly inadequate; her children, she believed, were getting hardly any education at all. Once, when her mother came to visit, she said to her with desperation in her voice: “I don’t want to bring up my children in Johnson City!”
Shortly after they moved to Johnson City, their fourth child, Sam Houston, was born. Rebekah had wanted to have her confinement in the Sanitarium, but Doc Barnwell told her that its handful of beds was needed for patients more seriously ill. Although the doctor was present this time, the birth was hard; recuperating from the delivery took several weeks, and for years thereafter, Rebekah Johnson would periodically take to her bed for days or weeks at a time. She had always hated the drudgery of routine housework, and now she all but stopped doing it. Her mother came to visit more and more, staying for weeks at a time to help out, and Sam hired a local girl to come in and clean—Rebekah’s neighbors said that what the mother and the maid didn’t do remained undone.
Nor, the neighbors said, was Rebekah thrifty. In this desperately cash-poor country, where pennies mattered, women watched them. “Make, or make do” was the saying. The reason there was no bread for sale in Johnson City was that the baker in Marble Falls, who had to cart it in by wagon, wanted five cents a loaf; rather than spend that money, Johnson City women baked their own bread—although that task requ
ired them to spend the entire day adjusting the fire in their stoves, continually putting in wood to keep it at the correct temperature. Johnson City women scrubbed their floors on their hands and knees; “brooms,” Ava Johnson Cox, Lyndon’s cousin, remembers, “were too expensive, so you didn’t dare use them every day.” Rebekah didn’t live like that; in the opinion of her neighbors, she couldn’t. Says Ava, whose mother received ten dollars from her husband, Tom, every month for household expenses and, by making or making do, always had two dollars left at the month’s end: “Our mother learned as a girl how to can, how to preserve, how to do all the things that a farm woman had to do. She [Rebekah] had never been taught that, and she didn’t want to learn. And a woman like Rebekah, even if she had wanted to learn—she just would never fit in to the life that we had. She couldn’t learn that around here every penny mattered.”
But at the time, Rebekah Johnson’s neighbors didn’t think badly of her for not working the way they did. They saw that she had other qualities—and that she was generous in their use.
By volunteering her services, she persuaded the school board to start a “literary society,” in which she taught poetry, and “elocution,” which to her meant the whole art of public speaking. Teaching public speaking to these shy country girls and boys—many of whom came to school only occasionally from their isolated farms and ranches—was difficult. She started the younger students on spelling bees and “’rithmetic matches,” which gave them their first chance to stand up in front of an audience. Then they progressed to “declamation” of poems, to “pantomimes and dialogues,” then to debates, and, finally, the high-school pupils would have to speak extemporaneously on subjects they would study in the books, pamphlets and magazines Rebekah ordered from the extension library at the University of Texas in Austin. The girls felt keenly that they were “country”—that they lacked social graces—so Rebekah expanded the curriculum to include dancing: fifty years and more later, one of her pupils, asked what kind of dancing, suddenly became lost in reverie and then, all at once, began humming, very softly, with her wrinkled old face smiling in reminiscence, “Little red wagon painted blue, little red wagon painted blue, little red wagon painted blue, skip to m’Lou, my darling.” To records played on a Victrola, which she brought to school—the school couldn’t afford one—Rebekah taught not only square dances but waltzes and Virginia reels, and then, in the words of another elderly Johnson City resident, “she teached girls how to stand, … how to sit down properly.” She did the work without pay—there was no money to give her, and she didn’t ask for any—and her students were grateful to her. “We didn’t have anything before,” one recalls. “Before Lyndon’s mother came to school and got this going, school was only sitting in class and not raise your finger or say a word or you got spanked. We didn’t think they’d let her do the literary society; that was play, that was taking your mind off your books.”
They were grateful also for the lessons Lyndon’s mother gave in private—in the living room of the Johnson home. “Those lessons were the highlight of my young life,” says Doc Barnwell’s daughter, Gene.
Those lessons changed lives, in fact.
One girl who received them was Lyndon’s cousin Ava. Ava’s sister, Margaret, was beautiful and lively and outgoing. Ava was not. She was very shy, a little stout, and although she wasn’t homely, she considered herself so. Rebekah was taking one grade at a time in her literary society, working her way toward the older pupils, and Ava dreaded the day she would get to her grade.
When Mrs. Johnson did, and began assigning speech topics, Ava recalls, “I said I couldn’t do a speech.
“‘You come over to the house this afternoon.’
“At the house, I said, ‘I just can’t do it, Aunt Rebekah.’ And she said, ‘Oh, yes, you can. There’s nothing impossible if you put the mind to it. I know you have the ability to deliver a speech.’ And I cried, and I said, ‘I just can’t do it!’
“Aunt Rebekah said, ‘Oh, yes, you can.’ And she said, ‘Pretty is just skin-deep, darling.’ Ooooh, I’ll never forget her saying that. And she repeated that Browning poem to me. And she never let up, never let up. Never. Boosting me along, telling me I could do it. She taught me speaking and elocution, and I went to the state championships with it, and I want to tell you, I was one scared chicken. And I won a medal, a gold medal, in competitions involving the whole state. And she still kept boosting me along. I wanted to be a teacher, but I never thought I could: I just didn’t think that I could ever get it over to a child. I had always wanted to be a teacher, but I couldn’t sell myself. I had an inferiority complex that wouldn’t quit. She told me, ‘You have everything that it takes to make a good teacher. Just make up your mind to do it.’ She never let up, telling me I could do it. And I did. And I became a teacher, and taught for eighteen years. I owe a debt to Aunt Rebekah that I can never repay. She made me know that I could do what I never thought I could do.”
Many children owed a similar debt to Rebekah Johnson. Her patience in teaching English to German-American children who spoke no English at home and often not in school, either (classes in Fredericksburg and the Hill Country’s other German communities were often conducted only in German), became so legendary throughout the area that German families brought their children long miles to the Johnson home. Asked years later why he had done so, one man—from San Marcos, thirty miles away—said: “I had heard praises of Mrs. Johnson since the time when I was a child.”
Her husband adored her. Their marriage was a “miss fit,” says Ava, pronouncing that last word as two words to give it the emphasis she feels it needs for accuracy. “It was a miss fit, but she wanted to make the best of it because she loved him. And he loved her. Oh, he adored her. He worshipped the ground she walked on.”
A miss fit it was, in the sense that their personalities were indeed as “completely opposite” as Rebekah wrote. “Mrs. Johnson was always cheerful, kind and considerate. … She was a gentle, gentle woman,” Mrs. Gliddon wrote. “Quite the contrary was her husband, Mr. Sam.” If nothing could ruffle her calm, so nothing could tame his temper. The Buntons burned without matches, and his fuse was terribly short. And often his anger was directed at his wife.
But it was a temper as quick to die out as to blaze up. As his wife wrote: “Highly organized, sensitive, and nervous, he was impatient of inefficiency and ineptitude and quick to voice his displeasure; equally quick, however, in making amends when some word of his caused pain to another.” Once, recalls Louise Casparis, daughter of one of the poorest families in Johnson City, who worked in the Johnson home, “Mr. Sam lost his temper at me—really got mad about something I had done wrong.” But when she arrived at the house the next day, “there on the mantelpiece was a beautiful box of candy for me.” He never said a word of apology to her, but she learned he had driven all the way to Fredericksburg to get it. Louise—and other women who worked (and, in some cases, lived) in the Johnson home—agree with neighbors and relatives that the attempts of some biographers to portray the Johnson home as one of unending and bitter conflict between husband and wife are incorrect. “That’s not the home I saw,” says Cynthia Crider. What most of them recall most vividly is the way Sam would kid Rebekah—about the house he had bought for her (“He used to grumble, kiddingly, about all that gingerbread and all”), about the fact that while she liked to boast of her Baines ancestry, she never mentioned her maternal—Huffman—line (“When she got stubborn over something, Sam would say, ‘That’s your German blood again. German blood! Look at your brother’s name. Huffman! Probably was Hoffmann once—in Berlin!’ And Rebekah would say, ‘Sam, you know it’s Holland Dutch.’”). They recall how “You could see that underneath the kidding he had so much respect for her, for her learning and—well, just for her.” And they recall how Sam and Rebekah would sit and talk—for hours. If he had been yelling at her one minute, the next he would be making amends in his own way—telling a funny story. “One minute he’d be shouting, and the next
minute she’d be laughing at something he said. He could make her laugh and laugh and laugh.” Sam loved to talk politics with Rebekah. She herself was to write that “In disposition, upbringing and background, these two were vastly dissimilar. However, in principles and motives, the real essentials of life, they were one.” And that was true: they were both idealists. “The Baineses were always strong for high ideals,” she would say, years later. “They talked about high ideals. We felt that you have to have a great purpose behind what you do, or no matter what you do, it won’t amount to anything. Lyndon’s father always felt the interest of the people was first.” Says Louise Casparis: “It was something to see how glad she always was to see him when he came home. There was never any question in my mind that these were two people who …” Louise’s voice fades away at this point, and she expresses what she saw of their feelings by making a gesture with her arms—an embracing motion.
And for a while, it didn’t seem to matter that Rebekah couldn’t help Sam as his brother’s wife helped him.
For a couple of years out in Stonewall, the cotton crop was good, and Sam got good work out of his hired hands. “Men who worked for him used to joke that if they could have been anywhere else, they would rather have been,” Ava says. “He was a driver, Uncle Sam was. He was a hard worker, and he wanted everyone else to work hard, too.” And he did well in “real-estatin’.” In at least one case, where he purchased a ranch for about $20,000 and quickly sold it to Emory Stribling for $32,375, he made a huge profit by Hill Country standards. He hired girls—Louise Casparis and Addie Stevenson and others—to come in and clean the house; and Louise’s mother would take the Johnson wash home—lugging it on her back in a bedsheet—and when she returned it, Old Lady Spates would come in and iron it. He even hired a “chauffeur” to take Rebekah and the children for rides in the big Hudson he had purchased: the “chauffeur” was only Guy Arrington, a local teenager, but no one else in the Hill Country had one. Rebekah’s health was still not good—she had to stay in bed a particularly long time after the birth of her fifth and last child, Lucia, in 1916, and the next year she had two “minor” operations from which she was slow recovering—but she had plenty of leisure to do what she enjoyed and was gifted at: the Literary Society at school, elocution lessons; her needlepoint was much admired. She “put on” plays at school, and, to raise money for local organizations, in her front yard, with the townspeople paying admission; her favorite was Deacon Doves of Old Virginia. Sam was always bringing home surprise presents for her, and one day in 1916 he arrived home to announce that Gordon Gore was leaving for Arizona because of ill health and had sold him two items which Sam was sure Rebekah would like: a new Victrola and his newspaper, the Johnson City Record, an eight-page weekly. That didn’t work out too well—people in Johnson City were so short of cash that many couldn’t afford subscriptions; Sam had to take cigars, cabbages, and, on one occasion, a goat, in payment; and Rebekah was unable to cope with the mechanical intricacies of the old hand press; after four months she asked Sam to sell the paper; for years thereafter, Sam would laughingly tell the new owner, Reverdy Gliddon, “I’ll tell you, Gliddon, that was one time I got into something I didn’t know anything about.” But Rebekah’s interest in writing had been reawakened. She became the Johnson City correspondent for the Austin and Fredericksburg newspapers, mailing in local news items once a week, and wrote poetry, none of which was ever published. Sam saved little; everything he made, he used to buy more: more ranches; the little auditorium (derisively called the Opera House) over the Johnson City bank where movies were occasionally shown; the town’s only hotel. He almost seemed to be trying to achieve, on a much smaller scale but still the largest available to him, what the original Johnson brothers had tried to achieve: to build a little business empire in the Hill Country.
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