by Lee Hill
Situated at the junction of U.S. Highways 61 and 81, Alvarado is the oldest town in Johnson County, Texas, which in spite of its proximity to Dallas has never quite managed to exceed a population of around 2,400. The town’s humble origins can be traced to the winter of 1849, when a settler, William Balch, staked out a claim near an old Indian trail. By the summer of 1854, there were 100 families in the area. The focus of the town became the two-story Masonic lodge where an elementary school conducted classes. By the mid-twenties, Alvarado had an estimated 1,200 residents and more than fifty businesses. Alvarado actually grew during the Depression, helped in part by its proximity to the town of Cleburne and the urban sprawl of Dallas–Fort Worth. Farmers living in the area supported themselves on crops of cotton, wheat, corn, barley, rye, grain, fruits, and vegetables. The reddish soil could yield considerable bounty to those who worked hard.
Southern’s parents were both Alvarado natives. His father, Terrence Marion Southern, born in 1894, could trace his lineage to the state’s legendary founding father, Sam Houston. There was also some Cherokee blood in his family. Terrence’s father was a well-regarded general practitioner. Terrence was known locally as a promising athlete who fantasized about a baseball career before enrolling in pharmacy college. Upon graduation, he returned to Alvarado and married Helen Simonds, born in 1899, the child of Irish settlers in the area. For the first few years of their marriage, they enjoyed a relatively comfortable living thanks to Terrence’s role as the town’s druggist. They also ran a small farm. In addition to doing the housework, Helen designed and made dresses for other women in Alvarado. A few surviving photos taken in the forties show a vibrant, good-looking, and seemingly happy couple.
Not long after their marriage, their only child, Terry Southern, was born on May 1, 1924. The birth wasn’t officially recorded until the next day, creating confusion in various biographical references for the rest of Southern’s life. No middle name appeared on the birth certificate.
For the first eight years of Terry’s life, he was a small-town boy. The Huck Finn quality of his childhood was enhanced in no small part by there being very little for a child to do in Alvarado except make up games, help out with chores, read the funny papers, listen to the radio, and see the occasional movie. However, Terry started hunting with a small slingshot, and fishing around the age of eight. A photo of Southern from this period shows a child with thick dark brown hair sitting on a toy wagon holding a small puppy. His expression is one of happiness and delight; pure joy unmediated by the kind of irony and distance he would later become famous for.
For the first years following the crash of 1929, Terry’s father’s status as the town druggist provided some shelter from the full impact of a country suddenly knocked out by economic disaster. The Great Depression devastated many of the small towns and villages of West Texas. It was a gloomy time of foreclosures, dust storms, and welfare lines. Those who were lucky enough to earn enough money to support their families tried not to make a big song and dance about it.
By 1933, there were more than 15,000 people on the Dallas welfare rolls. Finding it difficult to run both a farm and a small business, the Southerns moved to the Oak Cliff area of Dallas; a protosuburb that emerged after the completion of the Dallas, Cleburne and Rio Grande railway in the early 1880s. Two entrepreneurs, Thomas Marasalis and John S. Armstrong, bought several hundred acres including the community of Hord’s Ridge in 1887 and developed the area into an elite residential community.
In Oak Cliff, Southern’s father worked hard to sustain an appearance of upward mobility. Like many young men of promise in the twenties, he took no small amount of strength and solace from drinking. When Southern was a small child, the drinking seemed amusing. His dad had a reputation as a jokester who liked to tie one on. He is alleged to have almost gotten shot by a neighbor sneaking back into his home after a night on the town. Southern would often relate the story of his father taking the Monkey Man from the state carnival on a drinking binge. He even refashioned this incident as a teenage prank in Texas Summer.
“His father was basically an alcoholic,” Gerber says. “The business wasn’t going well because it was the Depression and that was more of an excuse to get drunk.”
In the thirties, Oak Cliff may have looked like a tranquil suburb, but the country was never very far away. On frequent visits to his grandfather’s farm, Terry was encouraged to take an interest in livestock. His pets included various dogs and cats, horses, cows, geese, and chickens on the farm. Some of the more exotic pets included an armadillo and a tarantula. While there were always lots of chores on the farm, the simplicity and beauty of country life never left Southern.
During these visits his father showed Terry how to hunt. Learning how to use a gun responsibly was an essential rite of passage for a boy in Texas. Accompanying his father into the woodlands on the outskirts of Dallas, young Southern carried a .22. Deer was a popular form of game. The countless hunting trips inspired a favorite Southern anecdote that sounds so quintessentially Texan it would be heartbreaking if it weren’t true.
After a deer was shot, the hunters rushed over to where the animal fell. According to Southern, as blood pumped out of the dying beast, one of the party would put a cup next to the wound to catch the flow. As the cup was passed around, one of the good ole boys would inevitably quip, “A man can get right drunk on hot deer blood.”
As Terry entered his teens, his father’s drinking and its effect on home life became less tolerable. On the few occasions when he discussed his family background with Gail, he would talk about his father’s Saturday-night binges.
“He did tell me many times the game the father used to play. He’d demand the keys to the Cadillac and he would take off and go on a bender and his mother would worry. At one point, when Terry got old enough to figure out that this was a game, the mother would hide the keys and the father would say, ‘Where are the keys?’ One day, Terry had enough of the game and gave his dad the keys and said, ‘Here, go.’ I don’t know if there was a confrontation, but it was sort of like, ‘Take the Cadillac and go.’”
In spite of their mutual love and affection (Terry loved his father’s stories), alcoholism would become the primary legacy that Terrence passed on to his son. But Terry’s love of a good drink didn’t start to take its toll until the late sixties, when money problems began to erode his confidence and good humor. Unlike his father, drinking tended to make Southern more relaxed and gregarious allowing his inner grand guy to emerge. “He felt he couldn’t be the raconteur that he wanted to be unless he had a few drinks,” says Gerber.
If lack of money and his father’s drinking cast a pall over his childhood, on the surface, Southern was no worse for it. The move to Oak Cliff was good for his education. His third-grade report card from Winnetka Primary School shows he achieved regular As and Bs in literature and math. He seemed to mix with other children well and made friends easily. Yet Southern would remain at a slight remove from his classmates. An innate sense of life as one great rollicking narrative allowed him to see certain people and things in bold relief. School chums were turned into characters like “Big Lawrence” or “Big Herb,” whose spontaneity and lack of self-consciousness were attractive to Southern.
The growing impulse to reinvent and reimagine the world around him was enhanced by Southern’s quiet love of reading. His mother introduced him to Edgar Allan Poe by giving him a collection of his stories. Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, according to Southern, “was an extraordinary turn-on for a young Western lout. Nine years old, and I was already hooked on weirdo lit. But in the best possible way, because if pot leads to cocaine, E. A. Poe surely leads to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Joyce, Kafka, Céline, Faulkner, Nathanael West, Sartre, et cetera, et cetera, ad gloriam.”
In interviews, Southern recounted the story of rewriting Poe to amuse his school friends. In Poe’s novel a sea voyage goes disastrously wrong, turning the surviving shipmates into cannibals. A casual reader mig
ht suggest it was difficult to push such an astonishing tale of desperation and horror any further, but young Southern was undeterred. He labored not only to re-create, but surpass the emotional impact of the story by writing his own version substituting characters’ names with those of school friends. In one such Southern “rewrite,” an unpopular teacher, one Mrs. Dinsmore, was eaten alive. He took it to school and read the story to several of his classmates. They were somewhat aghast at the tall tale and wondered aloud if their shy friend was a little loco.
Along with Poe, Southern subjected other writers including Nathaniel Hawthorne to the rewrite approach: “They never seemed to me to go quite far enough, you know, there was something a little stuffy about them, I guess they were just too subtle. I made them get really going.”
As Southern entered Dallas’s Sunset High School, he discovered another source of inspiration: Tijuana Bibles, bootleg versions of established comic strips with a pornographic übertext. These X-rated versions of Blondie and Flash Gordon were passed around in the schoolyard. This trash lit reinforced the feverish imaginings of a red-blooded Texas youth and led Southern to seek out other sources of stimulation.
“For a while, convinced there was more than met the eye, I tried to ‘read between the lines’ in the famous Nancy Drew books, search for some deep secret insinuation of erotica so powerful and pervasive as to account for the extraordinary popularity of these books, but alas, was able to garner no mileage (‘JO’ [jack off] wise) from this innocuous, and seemingly endless series,” Southern recalled in the seventies.
For a reasonably intelligent and healthy teenager of normal urges and interests, unraveling the mysteries of womanhood went hand in hand with learning how to drive. The rituals of dating included taking one’s partner to a chaperoned dance and then a ride in the country. If the weather was warm and the night sky clear, there would be a brief pit stop to admire the stars. Depending on when curfew loomed, the next challenge was seeing how far one could make out.
“The ultimate achievement—aside, of course, from puss itself—was to get ‘wet-finger,’ also referred to (by the most knowledgeable) as ‘getting clit,’” Southern recalled. “It was almost axiomatic that, under ‘normal’ circumstances, to ‘get wet-finger’ meant that a girl’s defenses would crumble as she was swept away on a tide of sheer physical excitement—and vaginal penetration would be unresisted and imminent.”
This template for sexual conquest would fix itself in Southern’s imagination and replay itself in his first novel, Flash and Filigree. The novel’s heroine, nurse Babs Minter, succumbs to the persistent attentions of pharmacy student Ralph Edwards in the backseat of a car as Wuthering Heights plays on the drive-in screen. Edwards achieves his conquest by a series of deliberate and progressive maneuvers no doubt “researched” by the budding author while in his teens.
These and other rites of passage for many white Southerners were to a large extent achieved by guerrilla forays into the black subculture. In Dallas, the state’s institutionalized racism created a countereconomy located in the “Central Tracks area.”
Central Tracks near Deep Ellum (named after downtown Elm Street) was for most whites a no-man’s-land where the city’s railway tracks met. The area was settled by freed slaves after the Civil War. A cotton gin factory built in 1884 drew a pool of black labor that was further expanded by the arrival of a regional assembly plant for Model Ts in 1913. The Grand Temple of the Black Knights became the home for the offices of black doctors, dentists, and lawyers. An auditorium on the top floor was used for dances, meetings, and parties. A weekly black-owned newspaper, the Dallas Express, was also edited and published in the Grand Temple.
By the mid-twenties, Deep Ellum was a hub of retail and entertainment for blacks in Dallas. There were more than a dozen nightclubs, cafés, and domino parlors. The domino parlors were also used for backroom crap games. Blues legends like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leadbelly, and Lightnin’ Hopkins played regularly in the area.
Central Tracks became as important as Poe and other “weirdo lit” in expanding Southern’s teen consciousness. Many young whites traveled to the area for the piquant barbecue and ribs, to buy 78s, check out clubs like the Blue Room where local acts such as Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers, Lucky Millinder, and Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy played. It was in one of the various whorehouses in the area that Southern lost his virginity, a rite of passage shared by many of his buddies at Sunset High.
Yet Southern was not just another good old boy sowing his wild oats. He sensed that the blacks, in spite of their oppressed status and lack of opportunity, possessed a richer sense of cultural identity than the whites. In the title story of his 1967 anthology, Red Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes, Southern wrote movingly of a white boy’s friendship with a black farmhand called CK. Southern said CK was a composite of blacks he met as a boy and teenager. There was a farmhand at his uncle’s cotton farm in Alvarado who gave Southern his first toke of a hand-rolled joint when he was around ten. Southern also recalled another CK figure who worked in a barbershop in Dallas: “This extraordinary black guy who looked like Sidney Poitier was a shoe shiner there, but he was much more than that. He was a philosopher, very well read, and he always had interesting books hanging out of his pocket.”
African Americans in West Texas were second-class citizens as far as most whites were concerned. At best, they were treated as a fit and able but not very intelligent servant class. At worst, they were persecuted by the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan’s reputation in Texas among middle-class whites rose and fell in direct relation to the state’s economic health and shifting attitudes toward the two established parties. To many whites, it wasn’t the Klan’s racial politics that was the attraction, but its promises to reform local party politics, enforce Prohibition, and champion traditional morality. Klan membership across the United States reached a peak of two million members in the twenties. Infighting, a general tendency toward demagoguery, and the less than stellar IQ level of many hard-core Klan members kept the party on the extreme fringe of American politics. However, while forward-thinking white middle-class Texans disapproved of the Klan, they shared the same belief that segregation was an essential part of keeping the peace and maintaining their “special relationship with coloreds.” Many local public officials and politicians in the Dallas–Fort Worth and Wichita Falls area had more than casual connections with the Klan.
Racism and the visible economic hardships of the Depression combined with his father’s drinking and his mother’s acquiescence were unpleasant facts of life for Southern. Culture in Dallas either meant the nouveau riche pretensions of the oil rich or the world of Sears, Roebuck, state carnivals, and evangelists on the radio. Dallas was a city where even the most prosperous and well-educated citizen was proud to be a redneck.
As a well-intentioned, thoughtful, and empathetic teenager, Southern discovered that simply being aware of prejudice was merely one tiny, perhaps insignificant step toward conquering it. The daily bus ride to and from high school was framed within that prejudice.
One day Southern got on a crowded bus coming from downtown Dallas to Oak Cliff. He could see a few empty seats at the back, but they were marked FOR COLORED. Since he was tired, Southern strode down the aisle and sat in the nearest empty seat next to a black man.
“He got very embarrassed and I said, ‘No it’s cool,’” said Southern, “I was that presumptuous that I thought I was the one who could control [the situation]…. The bus driver stopped the bus and came back and said he wasn’t going on until I got up. So I said, ‘Well, I’m not getting up.’ So the black guy got up, so then I was really in an embarrassing situation…of course, I had to get up. But that sort of thing would happen early on…. Out of that grows an awareness of the absurdity and irrationality of [racism].”
In responding to the stifling climate of the times, Southern was generally a go-along-to-get-along kind of guy. At Sunset High, he was a popular, above-average student. He belonged to the ROTC, Stam
p Club, and Biology Club. He participated in intramural sports such as football and baseball. He was also a keen amateur boxer. His bookishness did not prevent him from making a wide range of friends. They included Bill Ord (who later started the chain of Jiffy liquor stores in the Texas area), Robert Campbell, Ruck Hinson, and Louis Gillmour. It was Gillmour who introduced Southern to a concoction of grapefruit and vodka “to try to get girls drunk without them knowing it, and then slip them some Spanish fly.”
After his junior year in high school, Southern hitchhiked to Los Angeles and then traveled in the opposite direction to Chicago. It was the first in a series of journeys that would take him farther from the “Texas über alles” mind-set of friends and family and closer to the cosmopolitan centers of literature, film, and art in New York, Paris, and London. Little is known of how he spent his time on the road that distant summer. However, it seems likely that the sixteen-year-old was impressed by the sheer size of Los Angeles and Chicago compared to Dallas and Alvarado. It made him “see things besides sagebrush.”
Another rite of passage far less joyous than the junior year road trip: According to Carol Southern, at some point in his late teens, Terry apparently got into a fight that led to his rival’s accidental death.
“It was in a bar with a marble counter. Terry slugged this guy, who fell and hit his head on the counter. The impact killed him. The parents were apparently very understanding and Terry was not blamed or charged. Terry told me so few things about his childhood and growing up that this stuck in my mind.”
Other than Carol, there are no sources to verify whether this terrible accident occurred. Even in rough-and-tumble Dallas, it seems unlikely that a brawl leading to the death of another teenager would be taken lightly. Gail Gerber says the incident did not occur. Still, even taking Southern’s talent for exaggeration into account, it doesn’t seem to be something he would make up. Most of Southern’s anecdotes were designed to provoke laughter. This story provokes only sadness. Whatever actually happened, Southern experienced a degree of violence that made him shy away from confrontation—verbal and physical—for the rest of his life.