Tomlinson Hill

by Chris Tomlinson

  While in Maryland, I started dating a friend of a Colorado friend. Her name was Lisa Horenstein and she lived in Philadelphia, where she attended pharmacy school. In the summer of 1986, Lisa’s father and stepmother, Birgit, decided to move to Copenhagen, and Lisa went with them.

  Lisa and I wrote every day, and I negotiated a job in Germany as part of my reenlistment. My contract called for spending all four years in Bad Aibling, a small town halfway between Munich and Salzburg. I hoped to regularly visit Copenhagen to see Lisa. But Dick, Birgit, and Lisa had no sooner settled in Denmark than Birgit wanted to return to Philadelphia. Lisa was back within driving distance of Fort Meade, and we grew more in love, but her relocation threw a wrinkle in our plan. I was leaving for Germany, and the only way the army would let us live together is if we got married. Lisa wanted to live in Europe and accepted my marriage proposal. I was twenty-one years old and she was twenty.

  AN AWAKENING

  We settled into an idyllic Bavarian village called Bruckmühl in early 1987, a short drive from the mountains and a covert National Security Agency base. Lisa got a job at the base library and I worked as a cryptanalyst, which involved studying Russian telecommunications. My unit worked a week of days, followed by a week of evenings, and then a week of overnight shifts. My commander gave me a squad of soldiers to supervise, and I led them in physical fitness and rifle training to keep their skills up. The University of Maryland offered college classes on base, and Lisa and I attended as many as we could manage. I started reading about race, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X left a lasting impression. For a hobby, I joined a community theater group on base, where I starred in, directed, and produced plays.

  With our busy schedules, Lisa and I struggled to find time for each other. She made friends with the other civilians and spouses, and my world rotated around the people I worked with. Birgit visited often and never hid her feeling that her stepdaughter had made a mistake by marrying an army sergeant. I had no tolerance for her bullying and often upset Birgit when I used my sergeant’s tone while speaking to her. Lisa could not tolerate any criticism toward the woman who had raised her. Lisa thought that my head was getting too big, and every time I received an award or directed a play, her attempts to keep me grounded felt like she was robbing me of the joy of success.

  Neither Lisa nor I understood that to make a marriage work, it must be your highest priority. Lisa put her mother’s happiness over mine, and I spent more time with my friends than I did with Lisa. Part of the problem, I’m sure, is that from the day I proposed, we both saw the marriage as a means of living together. We never considered having children and always focused on what we would do once I got out of the army. By the fall of 1989, when I applied to transfer my college credits to the University of Texas at Austin, our marriage was in trouble. That December, Lisa wanted to go to Copenhagen for Christmas, while I had to remain in Bad Aibling for work. Before she left, she said, “I’m not sure I want to be married to you anymore.” We agreed we needed to make a decision about our future before I left the service in June 1990. When Lisa returned from Copenhagen in January, I told her I felt certain we shouldn’t be married anymore. She moved to Denmark.

  My last performance at the Bad Aibling community theater was for Black History Month in February 1990. I wrote a one-act play about race, which would be followed by a famous play called The Meeting, about a fictional encounter between Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. I put Lisa out of my mind, worked my shifts, and rehearsed the plays. During this tumultuous period, the University of Texas invited me to begin school in the fall of 1990. I counted down the days until my discharge.

  RETURNING TO TEXAS

  My best friend, Mike, was working at a bank in Austin, supporting his wife and daughter, and preparing for UT’s law school. I rented an attic apartment not far from campus from a retired professor. I tried to reintegrate into civilian life, taking off my sergeant’s stripes and becoming a college undergraduate at the age of twenty-five. I started UT with a ferocious hunger to take advantage of everything such a huge school offered. I attended my classes religiously and read everything my lecturers assigned. I joined the Student Union and volunteered with the Multi-Cultural Committee to promote greater understanding on a campus that ranked third in the nation in international students. I became close friends with people from all over the world and was exposed to a wide spectrum of cultural and political points of view. I joined the University Buddhist Association and eventually committed myself to Buddhism.

  After my first year at UT, I joined the Humanities Department, electing to enroll in an honors program that allowed students to design their own degree plan from classes offered in the various departments of the university. Each student needed to complete a thesis, and I studied how nations share responsibility for global common areas and wrote my thesis on the Montreal Protocol, a treaty to protect the ozone layer. I still considered becoming an environmental lawyer, but my score on the law school admissions test put me only in the seventy-fifth percentile. I wanted to go back overseas.

  Through my work with international students, and their causes, I met a student named Keith, who had gone to South Africa in the late 1980s, when the African National Congress stepped up the fight against apartheid. He’d taught computer classes in a township north of Johannesburg, and had helped the ANC’s military wing communicate by using computer bulletin boards. When we approached graduation, he invited me to go to South Africa with him and “join the revolution.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  We didn’t really have to go to the ’hood area, because those kids, they didn’t really do the things we did. They didn’t have the opportunity to go to a Boys Club. Their moms didn’t care for them like that.

  —LaVar Tomlinson

  Loreane and O.T. had their ups and downs in the late 1970s, but they both worked hard, O.T. building mobile homes and Loreane working at the Veterans Administration hospital in Marlin. They lived in an old bungalow on Park Street, on Marlin’s black southeast side. Seven years after Londria’s birth, Loreane became pregnant again, this time with a son. LaDainian Tarshane Tomlinson was born on June 23, 1979, at the Torbett Clinic in Marlin.1 Their joy was short-lived, though, when a fire destroyed their house while they were away. O.T. moved his family into a rental on Commerce Street in Marlin, but they didn’t have enough money to rebuild their home.2

  O.T. visited his mother and family on the Hill once a day, stopping by on his way home from Waco. Julie would often give O.T. a pie or some other food for his family in Marlin.3 O.T. remained part of his older children’s lives, though Terry was the only one still living in Falls County. Terry’s mother, Jewell, helped him get his first job at Waco’s Plantation Foods, hanging sixty-pound live turkeys on the conveyor belt leading to the slaughterhouse.4 After Terry made enough money to buy a used car, his dad found him a job with Centurion Homes.

  The two men enjoyed working side by side and made a decent living. Terry married Sharon Strickland in 1980, and the following year he took a job as a machine operator with Southern Pacific Railroad. He spent the next fifteen years riding the rails, repairing track, bridges, and signals across Texas. Sometimes his crew worked in empty fields; other times they walked to a café for lunch, if the locals let them. In 1989, the company sent Terry’s crew to Vidor, a southeast Texas town that was the state KKK headquarters and didn’t have a single black resident. “We drove all the machines up on a side and we was getting out, fixing to go to work, and them people come out with shotguns and told us to get back on the track. Vidor was very racial. They wouldn’t let us get nothing to eat in Vidor,” Terry said.5

  O.T.’s new family continued to grow in 1982 with the birth of their second son, LaVar Tramayne Tomlinson.6 O.T. tried to make all of his children feel like part of the same family.7 LaDainian’s earliest memories are of the Hill and his extended family:

  What I remember was just having a lot of brothers and sisters. Having great family picn
ics and reunions and things like that on the Hill.

  There was no area off-limits for us. We could do whatever, whenever we wanted to do something. So pretty much what I remember is a lot of time I actually spent at Grandma Julie’s house. But I also remember at times having to go to the well to get water, and pouring water in the bathtub and those type of things as a kid. It was a way of life.8

  As idyllic as the Hill seemed, it offered few opportunities. Farmwork was hard to find and paid little. The public schools were acceptable, but there were no community colleges or universities nearby. The 1980s were tough on Marlin, and local businesses shuttered, turning Live Oak Street into a ghost town. Young people left in droves to find jobs or an education elsewhere. Those left behind often found themselves in worsening poverty. Loreane didn’t like the way her hometown was changing. Unemployed men and teenagers loitered around the corner store, and drugs became more common. For the first time, she was afraid.9

  Wanting a better life for her children, Loreane convinced O.T. to move the family to Waco in 1985, cutting his thirty-mile commute every day. Loreane became a clerk at a convenience store near the family’s new house.10 To LaDainian, Waco was a big, noisy city compared to the Hill:

  It was a culture shock. It was so different from what I was used to, and so I remember for a while I didn’t want to go outside. I was kind of depressed because I felt like I had left what I had known, my comfort zone of running from Aunt Emma’s house to Grandma Julie’s house to my dad’s house to the store up the street. I didn’t embrace it at first.11

  LaDainian was shy, and Londria had just turned thirteen. City life didn’t suit her, and she chose to spend her school breaks in Marlin, staying with family and friends.12 The family would always visit Julie’s house for holidays, putting on barbecues for Juneteenth and traditional meals for Thanksgiving.13

  O.T. was proud that his sons showed an aptitude for sports, teaching them football, basketball, and baseball. LaDainian joined his father on Sunday afternoons to watch the Chicago Bears, their favorite team, and Walter Payton, his favorite running back:

  Every Sunday was a family time, but football was on and my dad would always quiz me on what I was seeing. He would leave the room on purpose sometimes and come back and I would have to brief him on everything that [had] happened while he was gone. It was great times really, and I think it really shaped my love for the game early on, having to know the details.14

  O.T.’s greatest love, though, was boxing. He was small but very muscular, and while LaDainian never saw his father fight, he heard stories about his father’s legendary uppercut.15 Loreane encouraged her children to participate in sports, but she drew the line at boxing.16

  THE HILL’S LAST WHITE TOMLINSONS

  John and Olga Tomlinson spent their retirement in the Victorian house their ancestors had built in the late 1890s. Uncle John leased the Hill to cattlemen, who brought cows to feed on the grass. Looking down to the river, John could still make out the patterns of the one-hundred-year-old cotton fields, but no one planted there anymore. On January 13, 1981, he passed away in his grandfather’s house, with his wife by his side.

  Olga lived on the Hill for two more years, but after she turned eighty-three, her family moved her out of the rickety old house and into a retirement home in Marlin. In 1985, her relatives sold the land to David Tinsley, a fried-chicken entrepreneur, ending 129 years of white Tomlinsons on the Hill. Both the first and last white Tomlinson residents were women.

  The following year, O.T. suffered the biggest losses of his life. Julie died at the age of eighty-six, and, a few months later, the roof underneath him at work collapsed, dropping him twelve feet to the concrete floor. While the X-rays showed no broken bones, O.T. suffered extensive muscle and ligament damage to his back. The doctors put him on painkillers, but even after weeks of rest, the pain did not subside. He tried going back to work, but he never lasted more than a day. After six months, O.T. finally went to a specialist, who decided to operate.17

  Doctors replaced two disks and put him in physical therapy, but O.T. never fully recovered. The constant pain, inability to work, and the need to use a cane left the fifty-one-year-old depressed. O.T.’s doctor decided he needed to replace another disk in O.T.’s neck, but O.T. refused to go through with another operation, even if he would experience pain for the rest of his life. He started collecting disability checks.18

  To cheer himself up, O.T. invited his friends to the house during the day while Loreane worked at the convenience store and the children were at school. The number of friends grew, and Loreane became suspicious that something untoward was going on. O.T. became forgetful and jittery, and by 1987 Loreane suspected he and his friends were using illegal drugs. He denied it, but she couldn’t explain his behavior any other way. After months of bickering, Loreane accepted that O.T. was addicted to his pain medication, at best, and, at worst, selling his pills and using crack cocaine. She said, “He tried drugs and just got hooked. And it was bigger than he was. That’s where it started, I believe, because he was on heavy, heavy pain medication. Sometimes you don’t realize what you’ve done, or how much you’ve taken. You’re in pain, and you just want it to stop.”19

  Neither Loreane nor O.T. understood addiction, or how to overcome it. The two argued more and more, with Loreane demanding that O.T. get off the drugs, while he denied there was a problem. Often O.T. would go to his mother’s empty house on the Hill for days at a time, escaping to the place he loved the most. He found comfort with his cousins and the simple farm life of his childhood. Worried that O.T.’s bad habits would harm their children, Loreane asked O.T. to move out.20

  The night he left, O.T. sat down with his children and explained that while he still loved them, he was leaving. He told eight-year-old LaDainian that he needed to step up. LaDainian said later that he was too young to understand what was happening, or why:

  I just remember him saying “You’re the man of the house now. You’re the oldest son, and you’re going to have to take care of your momma and your brother.” I remember him talking about that, but I didn’t understand why. That was a lot of responsibility for a kid that was eight years old at the time.

  My mom just said, “Well, your father and I just need a break from each other and we’re going to break up for a little while.” Of course, I [didn’t] know what that means. I just took it as my dad is never coming back. For a while, I think all those things of moving away and being around a different environment, different kids—that was depressing. I love my dad, you know, and so there were times I didn’t want to go outside. I really wanted to go back to Tomlinson Hill and Marlin and the area that I knew, where my family and I was comfortable running around from house to house and being a kid.21

  Loreane moved her three children into an apartment complex on Waco’s south side, where she struggled as a single mother relying on a meager income. A country girl herself, she didn’t like the crowded conditions and people living on top of one another in apartment buildings. She could hear other couples fighting and babies crying through the thin walls. Her children no longer had their own yard to play in, and the complex’s courtyard was full of children without adult supervision. The children made friends, but Loreane missed her family back in Marlin. She sent money to them each month, even though her own finances were tight. In time, she found a better job at the HEB grocery store in Waco. She also took a second job working in the cafeteria at a Veterans Administration hospital. Soon she was earning enough to move out of the apartment and into a house. Loreane even tried to reconcile with O.T. But he hadn’t kicked the drugs, so she asked him to leave again. She, too, became depressed. Even with two jobs, she simply couldn’t give her three children the life she felt they deserved.22

  Loreane was not alone. The number of African-American households headed by a woman rose to 40 percent in 1990, the highest recorded up to that date. Of the two million blacks living in Texas in 1990—the third-largest population after California and New York—30
percent lived in poverty, up from 28 percent in 1980.23 The African-American standard of living was slipping backward.

  THE BOYS AND GIRLS CLUB

  When Londria turned sixteen in 1988, she took a job at the Boys Club in Waco and suggested that her brothers enroll there. Loreane was reluctant because LaDainian and LaVar were both under ten years old, but when she found that the club provided tutoring and organized activities, she relented. Most important, it provided a safe place after school, and she knew that Londria was at the front desk.24 LaDainian counted the Boys Club as one of his biggest influences:

  The Boys and Girls Club became my crutch, where I needed to go to find myself and to become who I wanted to be. I think it was the greatest thing that my mom did for us, and particularly me.

  I felt like there were people there that really cared, because there was a time when my mom was working two, three jobs and there was no way she could be around. If it wasn’t for the Boys and Girls Club, who knows where I would have been, what crowd I would have got involved with.25

  LaVar said the Boys Club kept him and LaDainian away from gangs and drugs:

  Five bucks for the summer, man. We was there. It was fun. I loved it; we had something to do. We didn’t really have to go to the ’hood area, because those kids, they didn’t really do the things we did. They didn’t have the opportunity to go to a Boys Club. Their moms didn’t care for them like that.26

  One day, LaDainian came home with a special request: He wanted to join the Pop Warner football league.27 Pop Warner is a nonprofit organization that runs football leagues and cheerleading programs for young children and requires them to maintain their grades.28 Loreane looked at the application, the schedule, and the costs, but she wasn’t sure she should spend what little extra money the family had on something that was not a necessity. Nine-year-old LaDainian was crushed when his mother told him she’d have to think about it, but Loreane met with the coaches and asked what support the league could offer a single mom with two jobs. After reminding herself that the reason she had moved to Waco was to give her children more opportunities, she signed up both LaDainian and LaVar. LaDainian said he found his calling: