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Tomlinson Hill

Page 31

by Chris Tomlinson


  The stark contrast in my class pictures from the fourth grade to the sixth shows how quickly change came. At Lake Highlands, I had shared a classroom with twenty-two all-white pupils. In my first year at Hexter, the class size jumped to twenty-seven, with one Hispanic student and the rest of the class white. At Reilly Elementary, Miss Smith’s Class 6I numbered twenty-six students, with sixteen whites and ten African-Americans. I made friends easily with the black kids, but I could tell they were having a hard time. They woke up early to catch the bus and arrived tired. Since my education at Lake Highlands had put me far ahead of the others, the teachers at Reilly enrolled me in a talented and gifted program. The all-black schools had not prepared the African-American kids for the regular classes at Reilly, so they had to play catch-up.

  I became close to the class clown, an African-American boy named Talbert. Talbert was a skinny kid and couldn’t stay seated. He quickly figured out which of the white kids feared him and took advantage by pretending to be tougher than he was. I remember that my father asked me about him because other parents had complained. I told him Talbert was harmless if you got to know him. Talbert failed that year, and I never saw him again.

  Under the desegregation plan, the district bused in students from three previously all-black elementary schools and four nearby white elementary schools the year I started Robert T. Hill Middle School. The kids had remained largely calm during the first year of busing, but the students at Hill took the gloves off the second year, and just about everyone fought. School discipline deteriorated, and teachers stepped up corporal punishment. Principals and male teachers paced the hallways carrying paddles, some with holes drilled in them to make the swat sting more. During class, we could hear the principals “giving pops” that echoed down the hallways. If the student made no sound, we giggled. If we could hear the child in pain, we squirmed. On at least two occasions, a student pulled a knife, prompting the police to arrest the student. In one fight, an African-American girl cut another badly enough to warrant an ambulance.

  The greatest tension took place on the basketball court, where the black kids played a tougher game than the whites. A sharp elbow, perfectly normal for a South Dallas street game, triggered a fight with the white kids. I was small for my age, so I refereed.

  After I had spent two years in Dallas schools and reached the onset of puberty, my grades dropped, and I fell out of the talented and gifted program. I wanted to be like my father, capable of moving in any circle but not belonging to any single one.

  Bob tried to make some extra money by exploring his lifelong interest in photography. He took a few commercial assignments, shot some portraits, and even tried a few weddings. Working at Expressway had increased his exposure to homosexuals, and in 1977 he volunteered to take photos of his friends competing in the Mr. Gay Fort Worth pageant. I remember having seen the contestants in street clothes and then seeing the photos of them in drag when he made prints. He’d never taught me to discriminate against homosexuals, so I thought nothing of it. For him, though, this meant losing an old prejudice:

  I met a few gays along the way that I kind of liked—not sexually, but just as friends or customers or whatever. I used to enjoy running around town with Mr. Gay Fort Worth. Her name was Nancy, and she and her girlfriend took me out clubbing a couple of times, and it was a trip. Nancy really looked good, didn’t she? She looked like a really good-looking guy.23

  Bob left Expressway and moved to Circle Bowl on Dallas’s west side, where the manager welcomed the Lambda League, a group of gay men. They held an annual Halloween party at the bowling alley and my father told stories of men wearing tutus and sprinkling fairy dust on people.24 Bob describes himself as deeply antisocial, but he loves people who can tell a good story, or provide him with one to tell.

  One thing he could never stand was an uninformed opinion. I once ridiculed the sound track of Urban Cowboy, a hit movie in 1980. Knowing that he held Texas’s contemporary faux-cowboy culture in low regard, I thought this would win his approval. Instead, he sat me down and made me listen to Boz Skaggs, Bonnie Raitt, and Linda Ronstadt and admit that they were something special. I realized then that my father was never going to tolerate any stereotyping on my part. He expected me to be curious about the things I didn’t understand and to learn about them before judging. That was the greatest lesson of my life, and for that I will always thank him.

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  A lot of times, when we look around, we think that we’ve come so far, and we have. Then somebody would come along and steal that peace that you had, that things are changing and we’re making a difference.

  —Loreane Tomlinson

  The Marlin Independent School District began desegregating twelve years after Brown v. Board of Education by allowing students from either all-white Marlin High or all-black Booker T. Washington to voluntarily transfer beginning in the 1965–1966 school year. Only four African-American students chose to switch schools, including a junior named Lonnie Garrett. Garrett’s father and grandfather were sharecroppers and preachers in Marlin and well respected. The Garrett family enjoyed a reputation as a hardworking, God-fearing family where the children treated elders with respect. But when Lonnie chose to attend the all-white school, his clean-cut reputation did not protect him.

  As in many rural communities, Marlin’s phone system used party lines, which meant that half a dozen or more homes used the same circuit. If someone called the Garrett home when someone from another household was on the phone, the caller got a busy signal. Residents could identify when a call was for them because of a distinctive ring pattern. But if you picked up the phone while another person was using the party line, you could listen in on your neighbors. The trick was to lift the receiver carefully so the people on the phone couldn’t hear that you were getting on the line. Lonnie’s family shared a party line with several white families, and that’s how they learned how whites felt about Lonnie going to Marlin High. They called Lonnie horrible names and told their children that mixing with African-Americans would cause the latter’s blackness to rub off on them and bring down their character. Lonnie said he once took a white teen’s hand and rubbed it to show that his blackness did not come off:

  There was one thing my mother told me before I went to school, because she knew I wanted to go to that school regardless of whatever consequences there were. So she said, “I want to give you some tips. I want you to see your birth certificate. On that birth certificate it says Lonnie D. Garrett.”

  I said, “Yes.”

  “Now, if you hear any other name, good or bad, and it isn’t that, they’re not talking to you. So when the n word comes up, and all those names come up, you keep walking, ’cause they’re not talking to you. Until they call this name. That’s the only time you’re supposed to respond.”

  So that was a great thing; it really helped me to get going. Certainly my first day there was really chaos. I had a little briefcase my dad had before he died; I carried it to school with me. I walked into the building and one of the teachers said “Are you an insurance salesman?”

  I said, “No, ma’am, I’m just a student.”1

  Lonnie soldiered through the first month of school, trying to maintain his dignity as the white students tested him. He played the guitar for a talent show and impressed the white students, but the other black students had a tougher time:

  There was another African-American boy, Sammy Woodson; he went with me. But he lasted a week. I had learned, as my mother said, if they don’t call that name, don’t respond. Well, his mother never told him that. So he was really, you know, that anger—he had built a wall up before we got there. You know, he’d say, “I’m not going to take this and that.”2

  Three years later, the school board closed Booker T. Washington and sent all the students to Marlin High and turned the old black high school into a junior high. Anna Steele was an eighth-grade teacher in Marlin’s white junior high when the schools were combined. She said the de
cision staggered the white community:

  They didn’t really want it to happen. And I really doubt it seriously that the blacks wanted it to happen any more than we did. But when it was forced on us by our government, then we got in there and did everything we could to make it as easy of a transition as possible.

  When we integrated, everything changed. I really sort of felt sorry for the black children. They gave up their school. They became Marlin High School kids, and it was very difficult for them, I’m certain. It was very difficult for us, as teachers, to try to blend, because they weren’t as far along as our children were. So it was a very hard time trying to get them pulled up, and you could see some of them were so smart. They needed to be pulled ahead so they wouldn’t have to repeat eighth grade. Some of them did. It was just a really difficult time for them and for us.

  When the junior high went to the Booker T. Washington school, those were hard times. I know when we went into our classrooms, we cleaned and scrubbed to make them nice and clean. The black kids had been able to get up and walk out of class anytime they wanted to eat or whatever, and we didn’t allow it. That was one thing that was very difficult. And in eighth grade, we had some young men that were way too old to be in eighth grade, so it took a lot of hard work for all of us to pull them up. So the classes were different than what they were when we just had the white children, but I’m glad we did.3

  Teachers questioned whether to uphold the former white school’s standards, thereby failing the African-American students, or adapt the grading system to give black students a chance. Steele said she gave extra attention to black students but then expected them to catch up. She said the parents ultimately made the difference: “The parents of the white children were always involved in their children’s lives. There were lots of black families that were very involved with their children, but there were a lot that [weren’t]. It’s that parenting that I think we need in both the black and white race.” 4

  Integration exacerbated racial problems in Marlin, Garrett said, with students from both races resenting the upheaval and loss of school traditions, including separate football teams. The district also kept more white teachers than black teachers, angering the black community. Garrett said the races were too far apart when they were forced together:

  Our backgrounds were so different. We were the servants in the community, and most of our mothers and fathers, we worked for the white[s]. So we were more like a servant, not equal. Because I’ve been here when they had the white water fountains and the black water fountains in the grocery store. They had it in the courthouse here, the black water fountain and the white water fountain.

  What it had done, it had built up in some of the students that “I was just as good as anyone else,” which they were right [about], but how they had gone about doing it … the wrong way.

  They wanted to fight their way into it. If the white mention anything negative about a black person, there was a fight.5

  African-Americans across the state were more actively asserting their rights, working to better their communities. Only 40 percent of African-Americans held a high school diploma in 1970, while 7 percent had completed college. By comparison, 59 percent of whites completed high school and 13 percent had a college degree.

  African-Americans made up 20 percent of the Texans who lived in a dwelling with more than one person per room, and they lived in 25 percent of the buildings without complete plumbing. That year, 24 percent of black families had a female head of household.6

  The African-American voter-registration rate peaked in 1968, with 83 percent of black Texans signing up to vote at a time when they made up 12 percent of the state’s population. They were capable of swinging a statewide election.7

  LAST OF THE COTTON PICKERS

  For more than a decade, cotton farmers had developed equipment and modified seed so they would no longer need farmworkers to walk the rows, and in 1966 automatic picking machines came to Falls County. Farmers also let more land go fallow for cattle or hay production.8 The Marlin Cotton Compress, which for sixty-seven years had packed cotton into huge bundles, shut down for lack of enough business in 1966.9

  That same year, O.T. and Jewell Tomlinson had their third child, a daughter they named Flesphia. Tomlinson Hill was in the Rosebud-Lott School District, the first of the Falls County districts to integrate. Maintaining separate schools was a financial strain on the small rural district. O.T.’s son Terry was in the fifth grade when he first attended classes with white children. “Some people didn’t get along with [the whites], but they didn’t get along all together. I had some good white friends. The best good friend of mine, his name was Bubba Renfro, played football with me, too,” Terry said.10

  O.T. spent much of his free time in Marlin on Wood Street, and he was hanging out at Strickland’s Café one hot September day in 1970 when his friend Tommy invited an attractive eighteen-year-old named Loreane Lowe to join them. O.T.’s good looks, big smile, and charm instantly attracted Loreane, despite their seventeen-year age difference. He looked young and was playful. Tommy and O.T. invited Loreane to go wading with them at the Falls of the Brazos to cool off from the sweltering heat. Loreane felt an instant, intense attraction. O.T. told Loreane about his four children but didn’t want to introduce them quite yet.11

  Doctors diagnosed O.T.’s father, Vincent, with lymphatic cancer in March 1971. He was seventy-five years old, and he passed away three months later at Scott and White Memorial Hospital in Temple. His wife, Julie, arranged his burial in the small cemetery next to the China Grove church.12 Loreane comforted O.T. as he dealt with the loss, and O.T. became more devoted to his mother and son Terry.13

  Terry had his first bad experience with white students when he started Rosebud High School. He told me he wasn’t afraid of them; after all, he was growing up to be a big man and played outside linebacker on the varsity football team. Yet the hatred some of the white teens felt toward him bothered him:

  You could tell the difference in the way that people was raised, and the people’s parents. Some of them, they didn’t want their kids to hang around with blacks. And you could tell because some of them would use that word, that n word. Their parents was very prejudiced. They didn’t want their kids to even be around blacks. So I guess you could say that’s the first time I experienced that. And it went on for a while, up until I finished high school.14

  Julie also worried about her grandson mixing with white children. She and Vincent had spent years on Tomlinson Hill avoiding situations where they could fall victim to racists. When Terry brought white friends to the house, Julie often knew their parents and warned him that they wouldn’t like their children spending time with blacks:

  I was feeling confused. I’m wondering why? Because I wasn’t raised like that. I wasn’t raised around prejudice or whatever. Didn’t nobody never teach me about it. I experienced it myself. But she’d tell me a few things, what not to do.

  Don’t mess with the white girls, don’t steal nothing, and don’t take nothing that ain’t yours. And always ask for what you want. I was raised to ask for what you want.15

  Terry listened but had mixed feelings as Julie warned him to be careful in Marlin, where police often assumed that when a black man and a white man were together, it was for a drug deal. Terry said he could feel the tension when he walked into a white business in Marlin.

  Back on the Hill, though, life continued with little interference from the outside world. The Tomlinsons attended church every Sunday morning and on Wednesday nights, and Terry often found himself the only teen inside the chapel, where Julie expected him to serve as an example to others. When Terry had free time, he’d go fishing for channel cat or bass on Deer Creek, and if Julie saw Terry walking up the road with a stringer of fish, she’d have the grease hot in the pan by the time he reached the house. Terry was also old enough to join his dad on Thanksgiving hunting trips.16

  Terry enjoyed a typical teen’s life, playing football and basketball, but not con
centrating too hard in class. He worked odd jobs painting houses or doing basic carpentry work during the summer months and saved enough money to buy a used Chevy Nova for $150. Terry and his friends, both boys and girls, would pile into the little car with some beer and a little marijuana and hang out together in the woods or next to a creek or pond.

  O.T. and Terry may have loved rural life, but Falls County was not always a paradise, nor was it immune to big-city problems. Since the end of mineral-water tourism, and with the interstate highways bypassing Marlin, businesses and incomes suffered. World prices for cotton and beef hit all-time lows, and the city council resisted attracting outside businesses for fear of competition. In the early 1970s, Falls County ranked among the poorest counties in Texas, and one resident told a Dallas Morning News reporter that “if it weren’t for the State Welfare Department, business would really suffer.”17 Marlin police and sheriff’s deputies found themselves dealing with more drugs and social problems as poverty grew.

  HOLLYWOOD COMES TO MARLIN

  Paramount Pictures announced in 1974 they wanted to shoot part of a movie on Wood Street. Former Life magazine photographer Gordon Parks wanted to make a biopic about blues musician Lead Belly. Parks, perhaps the most famous black photojournalist of his generation, had turned to filmmaking and needed a place that looked like Shreveport, Louisiana’s Fannin Street in 1920. The real Fannin Street looked nothing like it had when Lead Belly played there, so location scouts chose Wood Street as a stand-in. No one had improved the low nineteenth-century buildings, and the Bloody Butcher had changed little over the previous fifty years. The only major change they needed to make before starting filming was to cover the potholed street with dirt.18

 

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