The Kings of Big Spring

by Bryan Mealer

As it turned out, too many farmers across Texas and the South were planting cotton. In fact, when the family ginned their first harvest back in 1926, no greater amount of cotton had ever been grown in the United States. The land was awash in cotton, and just as with oil, there came a point when there was just too much for prices to remain high. Low prices had hammered the farmers in 1927 and 1928, yet still they planted more. And when it came time to harvest the crop in the fall of 1929, Wall Street was in a panic and people were lining up for food. “Cotton is selling now not only below the cost of production, but below the cost of existence,” the Herald wrote in December.

  Once again, the Mealers were busted. And with nothing going in the oil fields, they resorted to wandering. As a cold winter settled on West Texas, they went home to Georgia.

  4

  A journey back east … then west along the rails … the Dust Bowl begins on the plains … cotton rebounds …

  Most likely, it was John Lewis who instigated the trip back to Pickens County. His father, Robert Moore Mealer, had suffered a stroke that rendered him mute and partially paralyzed, confined to a rocking chair. No one knew how long he would live. Nearly forty years had passed since John Lewis had seen him.

  They tied a mattress to the roof of Bud’s Model T Ford and filled the car with clothes and cookware. John Lewis, Bud, Bertha, and the kids squeezed inside, but there was no room for my grandfather Bob, who wrapped himself in two coats and a blanket and rode a thousand miles hanging off the running board.

  The road was full of families fleeing the dead oil fields, heading back toward kin and familiar country. The family headed north into Arkansas, where icicles hung like stalactites from the roadside shelters where they camped. They crossed Mississippi and Alabama, where Bertha’s people were from, then finally entered Georgia. They drove through the city of Atlanta, then up into the Blue Ridge, where the air grew thin and smelled of sharp, bitter evergreen. Near the town of Jasper, the Ford labored up the mountain and came to the lip of a great basket filled with jagged pine. In the distance, a needlepoint peak jutted from a layer of morning mist.

  “They call that Sharp Top,” John Lewis said. Beneath its white blanket lay the valley where he was born.

  He was four years old when his mother, Catherine Cowart Mealer, died while giving birth, the same age as my grandfather Bob when Julia departed them. After Catherine’s death, her sister Drucilla had arrived to help Robert with the four children, but her father, a Baptist minister, forbade her to live in the home as a single woman. So Robert married Drucilla, mainly out of convenience, and she gave him ten more children. But it was clear that Drucilla later resented her station in life, as if she’d woken up from a childhood dream to find herself imprisoned by a washtub and all those little mouths to feed. Her harsh manner was one thing John Lewis had been happy to put behind him when he left for Texas.

  Robert and Drucilla left Sharp Top in 1917, just after John Lewis lost the farm in Texas. They built a home twenty miles north, near Burnt Mountain, next to John Lewis’s brother, Daniel, then another one just down the road. It was in the first house, which sat vacant, where John Lewis and the family spread their things and took refuge from a world in crisis.

  They spent most of their time at Robert’s home, where he sat on the long front porch in silence watching the children play. Each morning Daniel’s kids spilled down the wagon road to get a glimpse of the Texans, taking them to catch mountain minnows and horny heads in the stream, wading barefoot in its sharp clear water until their skin ached from the cold. Having only known the flat, dun-colored oil fields, Bud’s daughters, Frances and Flossie, spent the first week staring into the canopy, searching for familiar sky.

  For five-year-old Frances, her first memories of life were of the Georgia woods, helping Drucilla gather wild berries and pokeweed and drinking fresh milk plucked from a rock cradle in the stream. Her first impressions of her father were there, too—him stomping out of bed at 3 a.m. and hurling rocks at the jabbering whippoorwill keeping him awake. Or him chasing her mother through the woods carrying a bucket of cold water, the two of them giggling. Frances remembered them holding hands, young and in love.

  Eighty-five years later, I would sit with Frances at her dining-room table staring at yellowed photos while her mind skipped back a lifetime. Back to the Georgia woods, where the sounds of her parents’ laughter still rang in her memory, along with all the unfortunate things that happened after that fleeting moment of joy.

  * * *

  There was talk about staying in Georgia for good. Bud even found a job as a cook in nearby Ellijay, and Frances remembered the family going on about the cherry pies he baked. But for some reason—she never understood why—the plan to stay was abandoned. After several weeks the family said good-bye to Burnt Mountain and returned home to Texas.

  Back in Big Spring, the family slept on the floor at the farm of Bud’s sister Fannie and her husband, Abe, and plotted their next move. The town was still recovering from the crash, and there was little work in the oil fields. Mornings, John Lewis, Bob, and Bud drove to the railyard on First Street to look for tools or pipe arriving on the trains, a sign that jobs were imminent. But the station was quiet. The only things coming off the freights, it seemed, were hoboes. As the trains approached the station, dozens of men leapt from the boxcars, their skin and clothes smeared with coal dust, then vanished into the streets to bum a meal.

  Big Spring was a rail hub for passenger and freight traffic going to and from the west. And because of this, the town became a way station for those riding the rails to California, where citrus groves, orchards, and cotton fields lined its golden valleys.

  Somehow a decision was made that the men would go to California to work and bring home money. It’s unclear if they had a particular destination in mind. All Frances remembers is that early one morning her father said good-bye and walked to the T&P tracks. Waiting outside were Bob, John Lewis, and Davey Jones, Abe’s younger brother, who’d also left his family at the farm. The men walked to the edge of the depot and stood along the ballast, the crushed stone grinding beneath their feet. A westbound locomotive shrieked in the far darkness, then lurched on its wheels, and within minutes they stared into a black wall of screeching steel. They jumped for an open car.

  The trains were still full of old tramps chasing the iron road, but now they shared space with families: exhausted mothers with hungry kids and fathers with bellies full of dread. There were lone breadwinners like Bud and old men like his father. There were blacks, whites, and browns, and there were criminals of every stripe.

  But mostly, like Bob, who was fifteen, there were children—kids who’d been turned out of their homes to fend for themselves, or who’d left on their own to ease the burden. At the height of the Depression, as many as a million teenagers traveled the rails looking for work and community, moving in vagabond packs and living in hobo jungles, finding both charity and brutality in the broken-back cities of America. They crowded the cars and hid down in the tenders where the coal and water were stored; they squeezed between cars and clung atop their bucking roofs. In 1932, about 75 percent of the nearly six hundred thousand transients on the Southern Pacific line through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona were under the age of twenty-five.

  The family stayed in the network of jungles along the route, tucked amid the timber and hidden from view. Each camp had its own division of labor—one person went into town to find a potato for soup while another brought salt or an extra spoon. Pots and pans hung from tree branches; crude shelters were made from cardboard or tin scrap and sometimes built up in the trees. Bob and Bud both carried pocketknives, which were like gold in the jungles. They hired their blades in exchange for soap or a bowl of stew. In a pinch, a knife could be traded for a pair of shoes or sold for cash. They cooked possums and jackrabbits caught in snares along the brush lines and traded their hides for food. But mostly, they survived by rolling dice.

  Davey Jones, who was twenty-three, was a road gambler wh
o’d taught Bob and Bud to play craps back in Eastland County. His brothers’ cotton fields didn’t provide enough excitement to hold him to one place, plus he hated to farm. So he’d haunted the boomtowns across the Permian, running tables in the bootleg dens. There were few men in West Texas who could beat Davey Jones in a game, and because of this, John Lewis and his boys never went long without food. In later years, to the detriment of his wife and children, Davey became one of the most feared gamblers in the state, holing himself up in the Hotel Settles for weeks at a time, one game bleeding into the desperate dawn of another while his sons banged on the door, begging him to come home.

  The jungles were full of peril. Thieves and highwaymen, known as yeggs, rode the trains and stalked the camps at night. One morning Bob awoke to find a fellow traveler dead in some nearby weeds, stripped naked and missing his shoes.

  Lice and other vermin infested the shanties and bedrolls that hoboes shared. John Lewis contracted crabs and, having no money for a doctor, said to Bob, “Go fetch me a sheet of newspaper,” which he twisted tight. The old man dropped his pants and set fire to the paper. Then, with his boys looking on aghast, he pressed it to his genitals.

  Jumping trains carried its own dangers. Riders who lost their grip were crushed under the wheels. They froze to death and suffocated when cargo doors slammed shut. Others fell asleep in coal compartments and were buried alive. Train tunnels took their toll of careless riders, especially in the South, where as many as five hundred people would cling to the roof of each train. Those who rode too close to the chimneys inhaled lungfuls of cinders and spat blood for days.

  If a fireman caught a boy riding the blinds between cars, he soaked him with his hose so he’d freeze when the train gathered speed. Worse were the railroad bulls who made up their own law. Boys were beaten and robbed, and others murdered. Some bulls were notorious—men like Texas Slim, who stood six feet seven, wore a suit and white hat, and kept two guns on his hips. He worked the T&P between Fort Worth and El Paso and most certainly stalked the yards in Big Spring. He claimed to have killed seventeen men, most of whom he shot off the tops of moving trains or plucked from open boxcars.

  Late one night, two bulls captured John Lewis and the boys after they’d jumped off a train. The bulls pushed the men against a fence and began frisking them for weapons. One of the bulls patted Bud’s waist and shouted, “Hey, this one’s got a gun.” He motioned over his partner, who yanked down Bud’s loose trousers to reveal only a sharp, protruding hipbone. “This man’s just starved,” he said.

  The second time they were caught, two bulls were waiting in a boxcar when the group climbed aboard. Everyone managed to escape except Bob, who was trapped. The bull held him at gunpoint until the train bucked with speed, then pushed him out the open door. His body hit the ballast and tumbled down an embankment.

  “I must have rolled the length of a city block,” he later said.

  John Lewis and the others found him in the weeds, bloody and with his clothes in shreds. But luckily, nothing was broken. They carried him to the nearest jungle, where they treated his wounds with coal oil, and he stayed there until well enough to travel. After that, they avoided the boxcars completely and rode the thin brake rods beneath the trains, tying their arms and legs with belts to keep from bouncing off. Hanging two inches above the ballast, they crossed the desert and rode into California.

  In the San Joaquin Valley, the men found jobs picking cotton, and when that was over, they followed other harvests, yet it’s unclear where they went. The only memory Frances has of this period is receiving a postcard from her father that read, “Greetings from California.” On it was a leafy orchard brimming with oranges.

  On their way back to Texas, a railroad bull turned up murdered on one of the trains. Word spread through the jungles that Bob had done it, and no matter how many times he denied the charges, they brought him an air of celebrity. The hoboes greeted him with reverence in every camp he entered, and gave the family a wide berth.

  Back home in Big Spring, the travelers returned to Fannie and Abe Jones’s farm. Abe and his brothers had inherited the 665 acres north of Big Spring from their father Newt, who had purchased it in 1923. The shack where the Jones family lived was only two rooms and a woodstove, with no running water or electricity, not even a proper outhouse.

  Bud cleaned up an old shed and moved his family in, while John Lewis and Bob squeezed along the floor with Fannie’s boys. Within weeks after Bud’s return, Bertha was pregnant with their fourth child. Another son, Leamon, was born in early March 1932. The morning Bertha went into labor, Dr. T. M. Collins arrived from the drugstore carrying his leather satchel and the children were sent outside. When Frances returned and saw her new baby brother, she couldn’t understand how the doctor had fit such a thing in his bag.

  Fannie had always wanted a girl, but after her sixth son was born, it struck her that bringing a female into that house would be child abuse. The boys were named Troy, Raymond, Earl, Barnie, Bobby, and Curley. They were close in age and tangled like bobcats. Once they got started, it was usually John Lewis who broke them apart, not by force, but by staging his own tantrum. He flipped over the cane-bottom chairs and howled in such a way that the boys froze from sheer discomfort.

  Having six sons was Fannie and Abe’s divine compensation, or punishment, for such a foolhardy endeavor as dry-land farming on the edge of a desert. Each boy was driving a mule team by the time he was five, disappearing behind a cloud of red dust under the blue sky. Their mother kept them nourished on tea cakes and fried chicken. Milk came from a Jersey cow they rode in like a horse each evening from the pasture.

  The law of averages for a dry-land farmer dictated that the cotton would grow only one year in four—never mind the prices. The other three years were either total losses—years when the sky gave nothing, not even enough moisture to plant a seed—or produced stubble that grew runty and backbreakingly close to the ground. The Jones boys had rarely laid their eyes on a field of knee-high cotton. All had experienced their share of blizzards, watched tornadoes drop from a sagging thunderhead, and seen sandstorms so bad they shaved a field like a grater.

  And they knew that rain, precious and rare, acted in peculiar ways. A story the Jones boys liked to tell was about the time Old Pinkie, the milk cow, got loose in the cotton field and Earl went to get her. He noticed something strange and called over Raymond, who was in earshot mending fence.

  “Come here, Raymond, and look at these cotton bolls.”

  Raymond came over. “What’s wrong with them?”

  “What’s wrong with them? There’s fifteen bolls on this stalk, and only one on this stalk across the row.”

  Raymond scratched his chin. “I wonder what happened to them?”

  “Well, it’s easy to see what happened,” Earl said. “The rain stopped in the middle of the row.”

  * * *

  That summer along the High Plains, the first dust storms began to blow. From Nebraska down to the Texas Panhandle, the year had passed largely without rain, and the vast fields of wheat that had been planted during the fever of the First World War began to wither. The dirt that had anchored the grasslands for thousands of years before being planted with crops now turned to fine powder and traveled with the wind. The Dust Bowl had begun.

  Yet ironically, farther south on the Llano Estacado, a record rain fell on Big Spring. Starting in August, it came hard and late in the season, so late that farmers began losing sleep dreaming of cotton bolls blooming with fungus. But the skies cleared just before the bolls opened. The weevils and worms stayed away, and prices—at record lows just a year earlier—eased up, as less acreage was under seed. For once, it seemed, God heaped his reward on the soil beneath my family’s feet. While the sodbusters up north entered the greatest environmental disaster the country had ever seen, Howard County enjoyed its best cotton crop in a quarter century.

  The boom lasted through the fall and winter, with Big Spring at the center. The sudden flood
of money and workers provided a respite to the indignities of the Depression. Newspaper ads sang of the brief fortune:

  Cotton Pickers Needed! Fifty Cents per Hundred Pounds. Meet at Chamber of Commerce 6am.

  Want 3 Families That Can Pick a Bale a Day Each. House Furnished.

  A Family of Six Will Gather Your Crop and Care for Your Stock. Must Have Good Cotton. Apply 407 Gregg.

  Up on the Jones farm, everyone dragged a cotton sack and picked their rows. And when the rows had been stripped clean and the cotton hauled to the gin, they moved to other farmers’ fields. Then winter arrived, and mornings were unbearably cold. The family huddled in the dark and shivered, waiting for the sun to rise and melt the frost. The kids wore baggy secondhand coats doled out by the Salvation Army, while the men dressed in coveralls stained from the oil fields. They stomped their boots on the soft dirt and rolled cigarettes to stay warm, their fingers as stiff as kindling. Cotton tramps poured off the morning trains and headed into town, while cotton trucks, overloaded and threatening to tip on the narrow, humpbacked roads, slowed traffic and filled the air with dander.

  But by the end of the season, migrants from the Rio Grande Valley started showing up in great numbers offering to pick for half the money—even a quarter—and after that, the picking jobs disappeared. By 1933, the drought on the High Plains finally reached West Texas.

  * * *

  The wind blew hard and sucked away all the moisture, burned the tender shoots and lashed the cotton low against the ground. Winter winds then lifted the topsoil and carried it north, depositing tons of red gypsum dust all across the plains. In April, a Big Spring businessman named Bob Cook sent the state of Nebraska an invoice for all the West Texas “fertilizer” that now covered their fields. He estimated its worth at $12.5 million.

  Abe Jones didn’t stand a chance. That year, his cotton died before it could bloom, his feed crops shriveled, and by spring his cattle—fewer than a dozen—ran out of grass and began to starve. Starting in July 1934, the Roosevelt administration enacted the Agriculture Adjustment Act in West Texas to lessen the damage. The government started buying up cattle to get prices back on the level and feed the millions on relief. Healthy animals fetched upwards of twenty dollars apiece. By the third day of the program, ranchers around Big Spring had unloaded over three thousand head. Most of which were taken to the cannery on Ninth and Main, where they were rendered into food.