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Please Turn Around by Kevin Tully
I had a great aunt that was a school teacher from a very small town in Texas. She was a feminist and a liberal and probably would not have fully understood the meaning of the labels. She left the very small town and moved to considerably larger town on the coast. Choosing to be a feminist and a liberal — she left the teaching profession and took a position in a department store selling women’s hosiery and lingerie. She never married. There was much speculation about her promiscuity. No one ever met a “boyfriend”. She would attend social functions unescorted or on the arm of a favorite nephew. When she died her funeral was attended by mostly family and the few, still living, co-workers.
When her sisters and a niece went to her home to clean out things they found many “shocking” love letters. Among her photographs were countless images of her in places and with people that were not familiar or recognizable. Her bookshelves were full of titles that her siblings had never heard of. There were even quite a few books on art that contained images that were “just not acceptable”. They opened her closet and were dazzled and amazed and then “horrified” by the “opulence” of her wardrobe. She even had one evening gown, “that appeared to have exposed a considerable amount of her ample bosom”.
Her brother would not talk about any of this. He would simply smile and shake his head at the mention of her name. He had lived his life out in the very small town eking out a bare bones existence, raising wheat and cattle; on very cruel Central Texas hard scrabble country. He would go into the county seat each weekend and stand or sit outside the feed store or the dry goods store, spend the day talking with other hardscrabble farmers and ranchers about current events, politics, gossip and a particular philosophy gleaned from tent revivals, encyclopedias, farmers almanacs, old newspapers and “picture books”.
He was admired for his self-education.
When he died most of his contemporaries had long since passed. His funeral was large. It was a large family. No one lived in the very small town anymore. His people had dispersed across the state to Houston, Corpus Christi, Dallas and San Antonio. Standing beside his grave were college professors, business executives, scientists, advertising executives, building contractors and real estate professionals. His wife had been hidden from Comanches as a child. His father had come to Texas from Mississippi and built a mill on a creek that didn’t always run. His uncle carried “a terrible bad wound” he’d gotten somewhere in South Texas working as a Texas Ranger.
When his son died in Houston the family assembled to clean-out the house. His bookshelves were full of books: that created some tension among the assembled family. However they managed to create an equitable lottery of sorts.
There is quite a lot of negative information in the press about Texas, specifically the anti-literate movement. It is real. But, that’s not how it was.
